Kennedy Schroeder (b. 2000, Rockford, Illinois) received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in painting and visual communication, and she is currently a second year in the MAFA program at University of the Arts London Central Saint Martins (expected graduation July 2026). Trained as an oil painter and watercolorist, she situates her practice in play by exploring materiality and childlike craft to build environments and textures conceptually linked to memory. These emotionally driven experiences, often rooted in nature, develop openings for abstract narratives and help her understand how her own past impacts her present.

STATEMENT

An eerie glow illuminates viscous landscapes where textures, forms, and color drift between familiarity and invention. These painted worlds hover between emotional refuge and exhaustion, balancing comfort with an underlying sense of longing and restlessness. Through intuitive mark-making, layered digital collage, and constructed maquettes, I build fragmented environments that resist fixed narratives and instead invite wandering, projection, and play.

My practice explores how memory, rest, and emotional experience can manifest spatially through painting. While my earlier work centered more directly on childhood recollection and storytelling, my current approach is increasingly guided by instinct and energy levels. Rather than constructing linear narratives, I think about my paintings as open worlds—spaces viewers can move through freely, imprinting their own experiences, emotions, and associations onto the work. I want the viewer to confront these landscapes, not as passive observers on a prescribed path, but as active participants navigating ambiguous terrain.

Physical world-building remains an important part of my process. Handmade maquettes and digital layering operate as tools for constructing immersive visual language before the act of painting begins. These varying fragments reflect the unstable and fallible nature of memory itself. The resulting compositions become sites where past and present feelings blur together, allowing emotional clarity to emerge through abstraction rather than illustration.

Growing up in a small rural town continues to shape my desire to create accessible work that encourages personal connection without relying on dense or exclusionary language. Through meandering forests, I hope to create emotionally open environments where viewers can rest, reflect, and form connections through their own lived experiences.