Jill Kennedy-McNeill is a London-based artist working across multi-disciplinary and socially engaged forms. Originally trained in Fashion and Textiles, her practice is concerned with the systems through which labour is organised, obscured and resisted, and with what those systems leave behind, not only as record, but as residue. The accumulated feeling that institutional process generates, and then reduces or refuses to acknowledge.

Her work takes its raw materials from the documentary detritus of working life: debt collection correspondence, the documentation of institutional procedure, archival textile collections without provenance, the uniform of the precarious worker. These are not illustrations of economic conditions, but evidence of them, remade through weaving, dyeing, embroidery and sculpture. Through these processes they become objects that carry, and often struggle to carry, the weight of what produced them.

Central to her practice is the question of how institutions produce and manage affect. How formal process absorbs, redirects and neutralises the emotional content of conflict and tension, rendering it procedurally legible while leaving its causes intact. This concern extends beyond the workplace into the spaces where its consequences are adjudicated. Her ongoing engagement with legal environments- the court as a site in which bodies are sorted, weighted and assessed- investigates how spatial arrangement, dress, ritual and document together produce and contain feeling: asking who is entitled to occupy space, on what terms, and what gets left behind when proceedings conclude. Here, textiles function not only as material but as method. The haptic, the proxemic and the archival are drawn together to articulate what institutional environments do to the people within them, and what those people do, quietly, in return.

Across projects, she is interested in the gap between how work is described and how it is experienced- the regulatory function of mainstream cultural narratives that reframe exploitation as self-actualisation, the archival logic that attributes creative labour to institutions rather than individuals, the procedural mechanisms that manage dissent without resolving it. What her work asks is: what happens when those mechanisms are turned inside out and made, literally, into the thing itself- when the form of institutional control becomes the material of its own critique.

Her work and writing has appeared in Recessed Space, Radical Art Review and Bloomsbury Collections, among others.