Aspiration is never judged evenly. In privileged culture, self-fashioning and improvement are read as cultivation. In working-class culture, the same desires can be recoded as pretension, imitation or excess. Kenny enlarges, gilds, polishes and monumentalises ordinary, damaged and synthetic things, giving them the status they appear to desire. These transformations are affectionate and unstable. They acknowledge the pleasure of becoming while exposing the gatekeeping that decides who may claim beauty, confidence and cultural space without embarrassment. Aspiration here is not a wish to escape one’s class. It is a refusal to accept that value and possibility belong naturally to somebody else.
enough rope to hang em’selves, 2016
Odds and Ends, 2011- Ongoing
Endless Bowlcut, 2018
AspiratioAspiratAspiraFalse Comfort, 2016
Lumpe, 2022
enough rope to hang emselves, 2016
Rag, 2022
Don’t let me down, 2012
Midsummer morn, 2017