Priscilla Kennedy

PRISCILLA KENNEDY
SOFT MACHINES, PHANTOM LIMBS

PARIS
25 MARCH – 23 MAY

Invited by Fondation H for a research and creation residency at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris, Priscilla Kennedy is developing the project: Soft Machines, Phantom Limbs, presented at the parisian space of Fondation H from 25 March to 23 May 2026.

PROJECT STATEMENT OF INTENT

Soft Machines, Phantom Limbs is a research-led and materially immersive project that explores the body as a living interface, part limb, part sensor and as a site where both empowering and invasive extensions can take root. The project draws on the duality between technology as empowering prosthetic and disease as an invasive growth, examining how both transform our sensory, emotional and cognitive experience.

Central to this exploration is the figure of the Octopus as an ongoing muse and metaphor as part prosthetic, part intruder. It appears as a symbolic extension of the body opening up the imagination of the body as a shape-shifting entity. It represents the blur between self and other, cradling and invasion, desire and refusal. It becomes a space of both hope and horror. Sometimes soft and nurturing, sometimes invasive and uninvited speaking to the alienation that occurs when the body no longer feels like home.

This project uses the Paris map as both source and structure. The map is broken down, layered and reassembled through a process of combining, interlayering, interweaving and manipulating color schemes. Working with motifs derived from the city’s spatial layout, Kennedy translates streets, routes and boundaries into threaded and knitted patterns that move between textile logic and digital construction.

Through Photoshop, the map as a motif passes through multiple stages of transformation; overlaid, repeated, distorted and reconfigured. The interweaving threads echo the organization of Paris itself: its crossings, hierarchies and hidden systems that shape how space is inhabited and navigated.

Aesthetically and process-wise, this method reflects the internal rhythms of Kennedy's practice. The act of threading and layering parallels the ways memory, place and the body are structured from within. The work shifts the map from a fixed representation into a tactile embodied surface, one that speaks to movement, accumulation and lived experience.

BIOGRAPHY OF PRISCILLA KENNEDY

Born in 1994, Priscilla Kennedy lives and works in Kumasi, Ghana. Adopting a multidisciplinary practice, Kennedy subtly weaves connections between the body, race, sexuality and fictional histories of objects endowed with hybrid forms of life. Her artistic approach engages a variety of media, including painting, tapestry and light, resulting in a sprawling deconstruction of the female body — including her own — conceived as a multiple space for dialogue and exploration.

Kennedy was awarded the Yaa Asantewaa Art Prize in 2022. Her research residency begins in January 2026 at the Cité internationale des arts. Her project will be presented in the form of an exhibition at the Parisian space of Fondation H from 25 March to 23 May 2026.

INTERVIEW OF PRISCILLA KENNEDY

Hello Priscilla, could you introduce yourself?  

I am Priscilla Kennedy, a Ghanaian artist living and working in Ghana. As a member of the blaxTARLINES community, I completed both my BFA and MFA at the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana (KNUST).

I work primarily with textiles currently, but I also work across several genres that befit my context at various points in my artistic trajectory. What mainly shapes my practice is a deep curiosity about the body, not simply as a whole, but as a living site and an open interface hinged to transformation, memory, vulnerability and adaptation.

I find it highly explorative to exist within the confines of the same idea I’m curious about, to experience it on a timely basis and even together with other bodies, spaces and things.

Could you tell us a bit about your background and the main ideas that shape your practice today?

I come from a painting background with a slight trace of sculpture, but over time my practice expanded into diverse genres ranging from drawing, soft sculpture, specific objects, installations and video. This is because I became increasingly aware and interested in the idea of a common language in the use of familiar objects and processes that spoke directly within my context.

My relationship with fabrics and textiles is quite personal. It connects to domestic histories, inherited gestures and especially to cloth as something that lived with the body.

I often credit my sensitivity towards fabrics to my mother, who documented her motherhood in a remarkable way. She marked each moment she had a child with a cloth as commemorations to dates and phases of her life. I think of those fabrics beyond domestic materials, as ones that held slices of time, intimacy, lived experiences and were literally portraits of us. It was that mere representation of bodies with fabrics that made me begin to look at the possibilities of existence beyond corporeality. What was my body? What has it become? What can it be?

That early engagement shaped my perception of textiles beyond their surfaces. For me they became archives, documents, portraits. They took on several forms of representations from cultural reflections to epochal documentations and geographic markings hidden in simple interesting motifs. This idea is made visible in my work either through the collection of old historical and cultural fabrics or imbued through the process of printmaking.

Aside from material probing, my practice is shaped by questions around the body and its evolution. As a site of memory in constant negotiation with vulnerability and transformation.

How would you introduce Soft Machines, Phantom Limbs in the context of this exhibition at Fondation H in Paris?

Soft Machines, Phantom Limbs reflects my interest in bodies in constant flux explored through moving image and tactile material forms.

The title puts together two ideas: “Soft Machines,” which alludes to something organic but also constructed, and “Phantom Limbs” which suggests a sensation felt due to absence. I was interested in reimagining how technological mediations, as a prosthetic condition, expands our cognitive and sensory capabilities.

I am constantly confronted with the realities of living between a “cybernated” landscape and physical space where the substance of my corporeality is in constant flux toggling between what is familiar and synthetic. Central to this inquiry is my ongoing engagement with the octopus as muse and metaphor. Through this lens, I reimagine technology as a prosthetic that expands our sensory and intellectual abilities, yet these extensions are not entirely benign; they manifest as intruders, like mutations or diseases that disturb the body’s rhythm.

Just like octopus, it is fluid, adaptable and alien, mirrors the body’s potential to transform while embodying the unease of an unfamiliar presence. In the context of this exhibition, it is a mixture of hope and horror, an adaptive extension and an unsettling invasion.

Through deliberate layering of materials and processes, sequins that glimmer like otherworldly skins, iridescent velvet that changes hue with movement, I translate these ideas into moving image and tactile works, creating forms that are chimeric and emerge as speculative anatomies that embody both fragility and adaptability yet resisting a singular profile. These forms reflect the body as a mutable archive, where identity is in constant negotiation.

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How did your recent time in Paris—especially your residency at the Cité internationale des arts—change the way you approached the city and its space in this project?

In my recent project in Amsterdam, specifically in Bijlmer, I was influenced by the hexagon shape, which is an echo of the Bijlmer’s high-rise geometry for my fabric prints, repeating the shape as a rhythmic motif. This has been the recent visual logic as bases of my fabric composition and that was extended into my project in Paris.

Paris contributed to this project with its cartographic structure. The map became my motif. It was broken down and restructured until it became displaced and less a geographic record but more of a bodily or memory system.

Some lines—especially the red ones—seem to create tension or movement in the works. How do you think about them in your compositions?

The red lines are based on actual vehicular routes I used in Ghana. Their appearance fuses together two territories involved in the making; one physical, one remembered. The color red was instinctively generated during the making of the works. In a period of heavy grief, I kept choosing red unconsciously as the body’s way of signaling a moment of unease and despair.

Irrespective of their function as routes, they also carry the weight of that emotional state. They are bound to movements made during a time of loss. They bear the traces of both geography and emotions.

As we are presenting your exhibition in Paris, Fondation H is also closing Safiotra [Hybridités/Hybridities], an exhibition by Yinka Shonibare in Antananarivo. Hybridity is a theme that also appears in your work — how do you define hybridity, and how does it take shape in this project?

Rather than representing the body directly, I often work through fragments and extensions arriving at a chimeric representation of forms that suggests bodies becoming something else. The octopus as a muse extends this idea of hybridity and becoming, embodying forms that shifts, disguises, merges bodies, blurs boundaries and questions what it means to be human.

For me, hybridity does not end with the collision of references but it also breaths in the idea of allowing forms to remain unresolved.

In this project, hybridity appears as bodies that are not entirely familiar, part limbs, decapitated heads, layering species and stitching them into weird or strange bodies that expands what is human. It is borrowing from anatomy, textile language, colliding geographies with emotions and imagined organisms all at once.

That tension between softness and disturbance, familiarity and estrangement are central to my work.

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You often work collaboratively when producing your textile pieces. During this residency, artificial intelligence seems to have played a similar role. How did this experience influence your process and the way you produce your work?

On the tactile side of production where I work with textiles, there is an important part of pre-production where I work with models as collaborators for photoshoots. It’s a speculative embodiment session where these collaborators are asked questions that generate interesting gestures as still images for the works.

The video generated in this project is an extension of pre-production. But here, moving images are generated through code, directed by intuition while exploring art-making in the age of algorithmic production with AI as co-author. At this point the idea of hybridity resurfaces through the process of physical work uploads as image reference and the part of hybridized authorship.

Generated imagery produces hybrid bodies and environments that exists between archival memory and synthetic construction. Just like working with collaborators, a given prompt is navigating a hidden field and assembling possibilities.

Finally, what kind of experience do you want to create for the viewer? Is it more about reading the work, feeling immersed, or engaging with it physically?

First, I am interested in creating a sensation for the viewer before comprehension.

I want the softness of the material to draw them in, whiles ambiguity pulls them back. I want my viewer to toggle between a space of familiarity and estrangement. For me, hesitation is important, it allows the work to be open rather than fully resolved.

Be lost.