Photography that notices
the quiet gestures,
unguarded moments,
and the intimacy of the everyday.
marie kenny
VISUAL ARTIST | PHOTOGRAPHER
I make art to honour the overlooked. Because when everything else fades, it’s the small, imperfect moments that stay. The quiet flutters that make us feel something true.
That’s why I make art. And why it still matters.
As an artist, mother and late-diagnosed AuDHD person, I’m deeply drawn to unspoken gestures and in-between moments that often go unnoticed, but say everything.
The way light lands on an unswept floor.
The abandoned half-eaten pear disturbing the still life.
A table set for one, or sixteen.
I make photographs that seek the quiet gestures, unguarded moments and the intimacy of the everyday.
My work blends documentary honesty with a painterly eye, using light, movement, and framing to explore themes like identity, heritage, belonging, and radical acceptance of the self and others.
Through my practice, I find calm in the chaos, truth in discomfort, and meaning in what we usually overlook.
I hope my images feel like walking into an eerily familiar moment suddenly stirred back to life.
(And yes, I’m resisting the urge to call it a Proustian moment. Barely.)
Childlike awe, unconventional beauty, radical acceptance and exploration of the deep weirdness of being human is what I’m after.
In art and in life.
artist statement
(sort of)
Marie Kenny (b. 1984) is a French born fine art documentary photographer whose work explores the quiet, complex beauty of life outside the mainstream narrative. Rooted in raw authenticity, her images explore radical acceptance of the self, others and one's circumstances.
Although drawn to photography from an early age, it was motherhood, and specifically the experience of raising neurodivergent children, that cemented her commitment to the medium. Photography became her way of making sense of the world around and within her, as well as processing her own late-diagnosed neurodivergence.
Drawing on her background in music and literature, Marie approaches photography looking for nuance, rhythm, and the poetry of everyday life. Her lens is gentle but honest, seeking out moments of connection, vulnerability, emotional truth and the lovely mess of being human.
Rooted in mindfulness and resistance to perfection, her images invite viewers to slow down to feel, question, and remember.
Marie lives in Cape Town with her family and continues to explore how photography can be a site of healing, resistance, and belonging.
Her images have been exhibited in South Africa and collected in homes that understand love might look like an untidy kitchen table or a half-eaten apple left exactly where it needed to be.
In addition to her photography, Marie works as a business and self-belief coach for artists.
(the bit in the third person that I obviously wrote myself.)
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© MARIE KENNY