Mary Kenny
Born 1968, Boston, MA, lives and works in Boston, MA
Still from Death Down Under, 2006, animation, 10 minutes, Lent by the Artist
In recent years, Mary Kenny has explored the interactions among animals, humans, and their environments by creating tiny sculptures that range from groups of figures to animal heads mounted on the wall like trophies from the hunt. Willing to do, as Kenny writes, “whatever it takes,” to achieve the desired result, her materials include clay, fabric, wood, and more recently, video and film animation. Although her use of small scale suggests fantasy and childhood toys, Kenny expresses ideas and emotions far beyond the juvenile. As she states, her works “make visible [her] elusive thoughts on the chaos of nature…and [her] primal fears…all with a touch of dark humor.”
In Kenny’s 2004 video, The Hunt, she animated her human and animal sculptures within a carefully crafted landscape as she depicted a lone man traveling across the Arctic tundra in search of his prey. The artist reverses our expectations of natural selection; the hunter kills a seal only to lose his life to a polar bear. If a polar bear can kill a hunter, then the human, too, must be a vulnerable part of the animal world.
In her most recent work, Death Down Under, Kenny continues to explore our role amid the cycle of life but in the warmer climate of the Australian bush. True to Kenny’s description, though, the work contains humorous elements. Her landscape, fraught with danger and death, is constructed of bright green craft paper grass and lily pads.
