Nick Kennedy / Sunny Blunts (Found Geometry)
Limited edition multiple
Adhesive vinyl and archival inkjet print
Edition of 5 + 1 artist proof
Dimensions variable
Exhibition installed vinyl size: 274 x 188 cm
Print size: 38.5 x 29.3cm (316gsm Marrutt paper)
2024
Sunny Blunts (Found Geometry) is a large scale modular vinyl artwork by Nick Kennedy. It is designed to be installed permanently by the owner as either a wall or window installation. It is made to be played with and lived with. It is accompanied by an archival print, which shows one possible composition, one of many ways to construct the work. This is signed numbered and stamped on the reverse. Also included in the box is a certificate of authenticity and a plastic squeegee tool, used to apply the vinyl to a surface.
The work samples architectural plan drawings of Peterlee made by Victor Pasmore in the 1950’s and recent photographs of the Apollo Pavillion, taken by Kennedy. The work is a collection of individual vinyl elements, which can be placed in any configuration or arrangement as a wall or window installation. It has been published by hardcopy* on the occasion of the exhibition Sunny Blunts: Revisiting Victor Pasmore’s Utopian Vision, a satellite event of the International Biennale of Non-Objective Art.
The work contains a variety of different motifs and forms, including fragments of graffiti found on the Apollo Pavilion. The work takes a reductive view of Passmore’s 1950’s plan drawings of the Sunny Blunts estate, deconstructing these images to consider his formal visual language, taking rectilinear architectural details and juxtaposing them with the throwaway and subversive, gestural graffiti forms - contemporary traces of people living in and interacting with the estate.
Sunny Blunts (Found Geometry) revisits the constructivist approach to the arrangement and placement of housing, which was central to Pasmore's approach to planning the estate. It celebrates the playfulness of form and the strong relationship with landscape that is present in the estate and points to Passmore’s emphasis on movement as a kinetic exploration of space and time. It responds to his view of the urban environment as “an artificial landscape so that the process of constructing it is not unlike making a pictorial composition through which you move imaginatively” and reflects a sense of the post war optimism and idealism that defined the wider new town project.
Nick Kennedy is a visual artist based in the UK. His work follows a path of experimentation with a practice that spans drawing, sculpture, installation and performance. His 'experiments' often deliberately parody scientific process to examine the relationship between intuition and logic, revealing a fascination with the hidden nature of things, time and materials. He seeks order in a chaotic world, recasting chance and unpredictability as his tools.