Babette Van Gerwen & Will Kennedy

St Margaret’s House’s 14th Artists in Residence, July-September 2025

Babette Van Gerwen is an artist and researcher investigating relationships between human and non-human nature. Her practice explores the intangible, bizarre, sensual and often unseen elements of the natural world; combing through the mulch to find things that may seem alien, to ask what we can learn from the murky, subterranean world. Drawing from experience in community gardens and spaces, she uses painting, found materials, costume and video to respond to play with our perception of the life that surrounds us.

Will Kennedy is an artist whose practice spans painting, music and performance. With a penchant for DIY, cartoonish aesthetics, his work often uses humour to explore tensions between fiction and reality. Abstraction is used as a way of investigating common expressions of culture, and how we can find ways to reforge connections between ourselves and the world around us.

Together, they have run participatory art projects and community art workshops at St Margarets House as Sundial Arts, including Art Club and Art in the Park. This residency was an intention to expand working with the public in new and more unconventional ways, building on the ‘Become a Worm’ workshop with 64 Million Artists.

They are exploring collaborative performance, costume, sculpture, rituals and storytelling, aiming to learn from the weirdness of the natural world to find ways in which we can live beyond ourselves.