Married To Oneself: Behind the Masks of Magnhild Kennedy
In 2007, Magnhild Kennedy indulged a lifelong fascination by moving to London. “I have had London on my mind since I was a teen. I wanted to live there even before my first visit,” she says.
Growing up in Trondheim, Norway, from the age of sixteen onward she devoured every image and word in issues of the famed English culture magazine The Face. “This was before the internet,” she says, “I come from a fairly small and homogeneous town. Foreigners were always exciting and inspiring to me. The Face was the only place I could get street fashion and music info.” The mag’s stories oozing exotic cool offered a vision of life that existed outside Trondheim, outside Norway, and far outside the boundaries of the mundane world that Kennedy knew.
Kennedy discontinued school at nineteen and made early expeditions into the wider world. She lived in Barcelona with a dear friend for a year during her early twenties. That sojourn was followed by stints back in Norway and work in the service industry for the next several years to pay the bills. “Life ran away with me,” she says.
Then in her late twenties she met the man that, a few years later, became her husband and partner. In 2007, the pair determined to move from Oslo to London and see what fortunes waited in that distant metropolis. Kennedy found work at a vintage design shop located in the largely residential borough of Islington, north of the Thames in inner London.
Working for the vintage shop meant spending day after day surrounded by clothes and textiles in various states of damage and disrepair. Kennedy soon took an interest in sewing and began auto-didactically learning complicated needlecraft techniques by watching tutorials on YouTube.
Though she had never previously expressed an explicit interest in fabric or creative work, the task of working with fabric seemed to come naturally to Kennedy. She nurtured this hobby for a time. Found objects and vintage fabrics were rehabilitated by her hand into fabulist, fantastic costumes. She and her husband began to regularly wear her pieces out in public as they ventured out for nights of dancing and revelry.
Today, this fascination with fabric has coalesced around a single object: masks. Kennedy’s innate talent for mask-making has led to a cultish following across her social media, especially on her popular Instagram account @damselfrau. What began as a pastime has evolved into a widely acclaimed brand and an art practice grounded by humility and the embrace of the unexpected.
There’s a tinge of prodigality to Kennedy’s story. Her childhood home was led by parents making a living as fine artists, her mother as an illustrator and her father as a sculptor. “I have always been a maker,” she says, “but no format ever stuck.” That Kennedy herself is untrained in the arts belies a congenital predilection for design obvious to any viewers giving her masks even a cursory glance. Every shining bead, garish pompom, or curl of lace decorating her works is a note in a symphony. Not a square-centimeter of her masks shies away from exuding a sense of purpose or belonging.
In the decade since she began making masks, Kennedy has developed a kind-of routine in her work that appears to foster consistent results. The root of each work, first of all, remains the vintage ephemera that originally inspired her to learn to sew in the Islington shop. London’s markets and car boot sales are her main source of materials, while the city itself continues to inspire her in the same manner that The Face did so many years ago.
“The density of this place is just crazy,” Kennedy says. “The people are wonderful, the museums are wonderful. But the people here are also from everywhere, and all the vintage stuff I find is the same. I travel to Paris yearly to find materials and sharpen my eye, for instance, but London is the place for me. The pulse is high and it keeps my brain wired.”
I do still prefer used materials, they already come with information, wear, marks. There is already personality there that I can just surf on.”
Boxes are littered around her home studio, full of the materials she collects from the markets in London and abroad. “I have stuff laying around so I rummage around and see if something gets me going. I gather materials, and use a little here and there. Found materials were more important in the beginning. They helped lead the process as I was figuring out how to do this. Now I use anything. But I do still prefer used materials, they already come with information, wear, marks. There is already personality there that I can just surf on,” she says.
Certain materials have sustained Kennedy’s creative interest since the beginning of her mask work. The wispy strands of fabric hanging down the torso on pieces like “Viir” and “Tanssi,” for instance, seem to be playing with the same idea. The occluding textiles in “Utaan” and “Uro,” also, might be two statements made from the same thought. The artist, however, is skeptical of emphasizing such linear relationships among her works.
“The same materials tend to return because they’re the materials that I gravitate toward,” Kennedy says. “I love fringing, I love golden metals, pom-poms. I love beaded antique lace, garish sequined ‘80s dresses and folkloric cottons. All of this is mixable. There is no hierarchy amongst materials for me. The right object will do the right job. I like old fabrics that come with holes or wear that will add character. Like age does to a face, it puts real life in there. If I get my hands on a material I like particularly well, I need to make many pieces with it to make the complete picture and feel that I have been with this material enough to be satisfied. This turns into mask duos and trios that have strong family resemblance. Any resemblance is often accidental. I have used pieces from the same lace up to eight years apart. If there is a lot of time between, it just happens.”
After some inspiring bauble does catch her attention, she tries to remain as open as possible to where the piece wants to go. The piece, by her telling, gets “sculpted” bit by bit. No design. No preparatory drawing or delimiting plan. Each mask is a bespoke work that grows at its own pace.
Kennedy says, “I have between five and ten masks going at all times. I try to do whatever feels natural, don’t overthink. I’m not a perfectionist, but I do like to get into the detail. I feel like the masks just wait for the right feel or material to come along. I sometimes get bored or pissed off if a piece is hard to get through or the work is particularly time consuming. So I’ll leave it to fester for a while until my feelings towards it change. That can take a while. But it’s a good feeling—like your brain has been side-tracking and suddenly gets on the right highway.”
Once finished, the mask is named. Kennedy appraises the piece and looks for a connection to nature, other artworks, history, or some other point of interest. She plays around with whatever comes from that brainstorming session until the word looks and sounds like the mask looks.
I like old fabrics that come with holes or wear that will add character. Like age does to a face, it puts real life in there.”
The final moment in the mask’s creation comes next. Kennedy wears the mask and takes a self-portrait. The photo is disseminated through her social media channels and heads out into the world.
While her social media presence started as a delivery system, it has become an integral component of the art. The Damselfrau handles and websites that Kennedy uses began as a wry commentary on gender norms. The portmanteau, initially her Skype username, blends the ideas of maidenhood and marriage. She says, “To me, Damselfrau has come to mean something like ‘married to oneself.’ The masks and the name attached rather naturally.” Today, Damselfrau is the fulfillment of the masks as performance. While beautiful on their own as objets d’art, Kennedy’s self-portraits, and her ice-blue eyes behind the feathers and tulle, instills a soulfulness that helps the viewer glean the artist’s passion for her creations.
“Everything I do at the moment belongs in the Damselfrau universe,” Kennedy says. In addition to the masks, she uses ephemera left over from mask making for smaller objects. “Crumbs from the masks,” she calls them. These include jewelry made from leftover metal used to make masks like the one featured at the beginning of the music video for MØ’s single “Kamikaze.”
“I’m not sure where these little objects and sculptures are going. I hang them around the house and on the tree for X-mas. It’s just a new strain, and it’s all related,” says Kennedy.
As Kennedy looks to the future, she is thrilled to be opening a show at The National Museum of Decorative Arts in her hometown. The exhibition will be her first sizeable show in Norway, at an institution that is dear to her. She says, “I’m very proud to be invited”.*
This article originally appeared in Hi-Fructose issue 51 which is sold out. Get our latest issue by subscribing here today.
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