Kenzee Patterson
Kenzee Patterson
Kenzee Patterson
Assistant Lecturer (PhD Teaching Fellow)
Kenzee Patterson is an artist and a descendant of transported convicts and British and Dutch-Sri Lankan immigrants. He lives and works on the unceded sovereign Country of Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung, Boon Wurrung and Bunurong Peoples. His art practice combines material experimentation and unorthodox mark-making processes with autobiography and language, often reconstituting spent objects into new forms.
Over his career, Kenzee has regularly focused on long-duration, practice-led research involving a multimodal, embodied engagement with Country, people, and materials. Kenzee investigates the parallels between the global movement of objects and materials resulting from trade and colonisation, and the punitive transportation of his own ancestors – speculating on the legacies and inheritances of these corresponding displacements.
Kenzee has generated expansive solo exhibitions for regional galleries, artist-run initiatives (ARIs), and a commercial gallery. His work has also been included in group exhibitions throughout Australia and in overseas cities including Paris, New York, Berlin and Vienna. His work has been curated into significant group exhibitions at regional galleries, university galleries and in touring exhibitions.
Collective and collaborative modes of working are integral to his practice, and he has been the founding director of three influential ARIs: Locksmith Project Space, Sydney (2007-2011); Cosmopolitan Decline, Broken Hill (2018); and in 2021 Kenzee founded the online reading and field trip working-group Magnetic Topographies with artists Clare Britton and Therese Keogh.
Kenzee has been the recipient of prestigious awards and grants including the 2009 Fauvette Loureiro Memorial Artists Travel Scholarship (University of Sydney), an Australia Council New Work Grant (2012), and an Australia Council 2020 Resilience Fund – Create Grant. In 2023, Kenzee commenced his PhD at Monash University, and was awarded a Research Training Program Scholarship and a Monash Graduate Excellence Scholarship.
In the last quarter of 2024, Kenzee was a guest researcher at the Leibniz-Zentrum für Archäologie (LEIZA), Mainz and a visiting artist at the Kunsthochschule Mainz. His travel and research have been supported by a Creative Australia International Engagement Fund Grant, and a Research Grant from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD).
Kenzee is represented by Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney.