Degree Show 2026
Grace Kennedy
BA Art and Design
My work specialises in textiles and handcrafts, focusing on the intersection of community art practices and social justice as recurring themes in my practice. Alongside my final year studies, I have volunteered and attended several community workshops, giving me invaluable experience in collaborative making and moulding me into a conscientious creative with a deep commitment to ethical making. Subsume the Labour is an immersive, hand-stitched tapestry installation that integrates stop-motion and process video projection to directly confront the audience with their individual relationship to labour, materiality, and sustainability within a hyper-fast consuming world.
Subsume the Labour confronts the deep alienation between modern consumers, global makers, and material processes. Constructed from discarded textile scraps, the hand-stitched tapestry serves as an active resistance against the disposable mindset of fast fashion. Overlaid onto this physical screen are two distinct projections: true-to-time process footage capturing the rhythmic labour of stitching, and a stop-motion animation that transforms evocative text into something palpable.
The visual layer is enveloped by an intimate soundscape that blends the micro-acoustics of needlework with my recorded breathing, sonically humanising the textile and blurring the boundary between maker and material.
By rendering the slow duration of craft entirely visible and audible, the piece challenges individual consumer complacency. It invites the audience out of convenience culture and into a visceral, empathetic confrontation with the human time and energy embodied within our everyday garments.