l a u r a  e.  k e n n e d y

Disney Princesses sell young girls a fantasy: be beautiful, be chosen, endure your suffering and, eventually, everything will become a happily ever after. Yet one detail appears again and again—the mother is missing. These princesses grow up without the woman who might have taught them how to become themselves, leaving absence, loss and fantasy to fill the space where maternal guidance should be.

 

Four years prior to the birth of her daughter, Kennedy battled brain cancer. The experience taught her how to not take our brief time on earth for granted. But it also instilled a lingering anxiety that she might not be around to accompany her daughter's development.

 

Known for giving her birds elaborate names and stories, she pushes this practice here into territory that is personal, uncomfortable and at times deliberately obscene. Her titles expose experiences that might ordinarily be edited out, softened or kept private.

 

These are not polite titles. They are not intended to be. Their vulgarity, humour and excess become a form of resistance—a refusal to package difficult experiences into something palatable. Where the Disney princess is given a carefully scripted story, Kennedy gives her birds something messier: stories of shame, desire, vulnerability and survival. She gives them the lessons that she hopes to impart on her daughter.

 

In this work, naming becomes an act of reclamation. What has been embarrassing can be spoken. What has been hidden can be named. What has been experienced privately can become public.

 

In deliberate contrast to the provocative titles of this series of artworks, the individual pieces revel in the canonically sinful approach that is; overtly feminine sentimentality. Each depicts a mother bird from a crested species and her chick, while the titles deliberately withhold any indication of which figure might represent the referenced Disney Princess. Motifs such as hearts, a deliberately ‘pretty’ colour palette, and elaborately constructed frames further reinforce this aesthetic language. The frames themselves function as a form of visual excess. They comprise of layered patterns that were inspired by the ornate frames held in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and designed by the Victorian architect Stanford White. As further customisation tying each surrounds to the contained princesses, each frame features a medallion with symbolic representations of moments from their Disney cartoon film.