In her recent exhibition A Thousand Disguises (September 1-October 13, 2023) at Gallery 1957 in Accra, the Ghanaian artist Priscilla Kennedy imagines the morphing female body, examining its malleability, fantasies and resilience. Interested in the intersection of human form and consciousness, the artist explores how it might feel to be in other people’s bodies, through their modes of thinking and feeling, and she refers back to her own body as well.

Kennedy presents collaged and cut compositions of bought fabrics from her local marketplaces that depict tangled and flowing female bodies. She begins the conversation with STIR by talking about her relationship with fabric and how she thinks of the body as a lived site that holds and processes encounters as information. Kennedy’s mother tells her that she would buy different pieces of cloth on the day of her children’s births to mark time, enacting a sort of archival impulse, wherein each cloth relates to one of her children’s births, signifying their existence in time. Drawing from this practice, Kennedy also began collecting fabrics that she envisions as a document of having housed bodies, differently sized for men and women. For Kennedy, the aesthetic quality of the fabrics is secondary to the fact that they mark the presence of women across time.

In conversation with STIR, Kennedy says, "I am building a language around the sentient body, so all these processes and techniques begin to make sense within that framework. I am also looking at something that is very present of what is happening to the body now, taking multiple fabrics from history. The body travels and evolves across time and it’s not in a straight direction, it’s connected to multiple sites.”

Craft as a cultural practice evokes the female body and, historically, female labour as we see in stitching, embroidery, weaving and other material processes. Kennedy also considers how encounters can change the body through time, evoking a sort of malleability and material and psychic relationship to the world. Speaking about the sourcing of fabrics, the artist describes how most of the pieces that she collects from her local market are woven and dyed by men, despite the depiction of delicate textile processes as feminine. This challenges notions around labour and the imagination of bodies. She talks about the “cloning” of material in the market and collaborates with ghost weavers, addressing the scale of production and connecting it with the generative quality of technology.

In considering the body as a site and an organism that shifts across time, Kennedy studies the form of the octopus as an intelligent species, how it processes information and shapeshifts in its environment. The artist compares it to the organisation of “senses” in artificial intelligence (AI) and its processing of information and visual data. The artist speculates on how the octopus becomes an inspiration for the evolution of the human species. Where scientists have taken inspiration from its ability to change its skin texture to make new materials with 3D printers, Kennedy’s artworks open up a new imagination of what it means to be human, with technology as a prosthetic that expands the human sensory and intellectual experience.

This mollusc species can be said to have occupied a prominent place in human imagination over the years, used through science fiction and popular visual culture about extraterrestrial beings. Hybrid female bodies depicted in Kennedy’s compositions take on the form of the octopus, through tentacular forms and sometimes replacing the head as well. Here, the female form is also the birthing grounds for new futures, compared to generative technology. Through the lens of feminist futurity, the artist identifies the body as a shapeshifting entity.

In Kennedy’s textile works, faces of the hybrid female form are not depicted, gesturing towards a sort of collaging that occurs in the material technique and the mastery of the pictorial frame. The artist presents the human as a chimaera, especially with a consideration of technological forms and their adoption. Connecting technological evolution back to the body as a site, Kennedy tells STIR, "I am looking at how the body has been represented in the now, connecting the body to data, historical materials and objects and how our bodies are like historical and biological maps. All these layered experiences are also documented as part of my image construction.” Kennedy goes on to talk about the body and how it can contain the mundane as well as the spiritual, referring to how we lose tangibility in sleep, existing across realms bringing in a multiplicity of beings.