Spotlight: Philip Kennedy's 'Extraordinary wrongdoing', 2010–2011

Spotlight: Philip Kennedy's 'Extraordinary wrongdoing', 2010–2011 Philip Kennedy, Extraordinary wrongdoing, 2010–2011

To celebrate the launch of our new website, we invited curators to pick an artwork from our directory. Here, Henry Moore Institute Research Curator, Jon Wood, selects Philip Kennedy's 'Extraordinary wrongdoing'.

Philip Kennedy’s ‘Extraordinary Wrongdoing’ (2010-11) is a crafty little piece. Just a couple of centimetres smaller than an A4 sheet of paper and 8 centimetres tall, it is an oversized rubber made of sandstone. Tablet-like, it might also remind of us of an IPad bringing together the digital and the old fashioned in a single gesture.

The asymmetrical planes also recall those of Epstein’s Vorticist sculpture, such as his ‘Doves, in which curvilinear planes are sharpened into tidy edges. We might read direct carving as direct rubbing: cutting away material to articulate forms beneath and getting rid of mistakes. With this in mind we might also see darker, more melancholy associations.

‘Former’, another work by Kennedy, combines eraser with gravestone, bringing the funereal into close and subtle contact with the gradually worn away lives of everyday things.

View Philip Kennedy's profile >

About Jon Wood

Dr Jon Wood is Research Curator at the Henry Moore Institute, a world-recognised centre for the study of sculpture in Leeds.