BIO
Rhiannon Kendall is a northern queer contemporary artist, researcher and writer with a drawing and text-based practice, born on the outskirts of Wakefield, West Yorkshire in 1996. Now living and working in York, Rhiannon went on to secure a First-Class Degree in Fine Art and an MA in Fine Art. Their practice and research often explores narratives of the queer, female, and working-class self in relation to memory and desire, secrecy, loss, and confession.
Rhiannon is an advocate at Queer Britain and has recently been longlisted for the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize and published in WordPower: Language as Medium and Creeping Expansion, a working-class writers anthology. Upcoming projects include an exhibition at The Bowes Museum and SelfScapes at Dalby Forest.
ABOUT THE ART
My research for SelfScapes has been influenced by how queer poetic literature and relationships historically have claimed rural, woodland, and private spaces as sites of desire; specifically, the forget-me-not poetry of Sappho, one of the first notable female poets to produce romantic poetry for other women. The poems often refer to violets; flowers which Sappho and her female lovers made floral chains from for one another. These flowers became iconic throughout queer symbolism as a sign of lesbianism and female bisexuality.
‘Think of who you leave shackled by love’ consists of two violet-coloured illuminated chairs positioned within the forest space, throughout my work these empty chairs appear to portray absence and the yearning for a lovers return. Vacant chairs are seen here surrounded by constructed violet flowers; a declaration of longing and departed lovers, ghosts of queer desire becoming anchored once more to the spaces from which they blossom.