CHRIS KENNY - TWIGS
June 2025
Andre Gide stated, with some irony: Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better. The use of twigs for drawing offers a collaboration between nature and the draughtsman. Twigs provide lines in space, for arrangements that are part found, part composed. The lines carry a natural authority and confidence that mitigate the self-consciousness of the artist.
The textures and subtle irregularities of twigs share the sensitivity of handmade lines created with graphite or charcoal, charcoal itself originally being a stick of course. Twigs twist and turn with unconscious elegance and rhythm.
Twigs contribute an aesthetic derived from their organic aspiration, their searching and stretching. This quality equates to the yearning limbs of a dancer, or the expression of ecstasy or agony, for example in a saint experiencing divine intercourse or needlessly sadistic martyrdom.
Chris Kenny’s daily ‘Twig Saints’ project on Instagram envisages the Saint of the Day as a fragile twig sculpture – a fine branch is cut back, edited rather than constructed, so that it retains its natural dynamic. The figure is accompanied by a short biography that celebrates the saint’s eccentricity rather than rationalising it. The strength of the saint’s resolve is contrasted with the vulnerability of each little sculpture.
These twig-men and women are brought together in lively boxed collections in which the balletic quality of each figure combines with others into a choreographic company.
In his twig drawings, Chris Kenny combines the organic qualities of fine branches with a sophisticated aesthetic strategy, generating balanced compositions within a few simple constraints to make a circle or a square for instance. The drawing may emphasise the natural curves or seek to deny them.
The intention might be the making of an abstract work or perhaps a twiggy translation of a famous painting, for example Veronese’s Noli me Tangere, or Runge’s Great Morning. Alternatively, an attempt is made to make the twigs conform to some calligraphic pattern, spelling out a simple, natural instruction like Breathe in, Breathe out.