"This is your break" Abigail Kennedy confronts the gaze

There’s no mistaking what you’re seeing. In This Is Your Break, the video playing on loop is not some abstract reenactment or found footage, it’s the artist herself. Abigail Kennedy, filmed by a former partner at a party where she’s visibly drunk, struggling to speak, trying to piece together fragments of memory while chaos unfolds around her. “The police were threatened to be called on my then-partner,” Kennedy explains. “There were, I think, tears and insults being hurled around, and a fight he started that had to be broken up. I remember all this happening only in flashes.” The footage is uncomfortable, not just because of what’s shown but because it implicates the viewer. You’re watching her, just as someone once did, too drunk to comprehend her surroundings.

What we choose to watch

At the heart of This Is Your Break is a searing question: why do we look? Why are images of drunk women consumed so casually, shared, mocked, and why is the cost of that attention rarely acknowledged? “I feel like this is something not a lot of people talk too much about,” Kennedy says. “Especially when it is very hard to do so in a way that is empathetic and shows nuance.” She names the double standard explicitly: “There is a really stark difference in so many ways between men drinking excessively and women drinking excessively… women can, but carry additional threats and responsibility.” Rather than describe that imbalance, Kennedy enacts it. She places herself under the viewer’s gaze and asks what that gaze really means.

A living room that isn’t one

The setting is deliberately confusing: what looks like a domestic interior is actually artificial, brown walls and soft lighting mimicking a living space, but just slightly off. “Like a school or church hall or community centre,” Kennedy notes. “I wanted people who went in to feel uneasy… familiar but at the same time not.”
That uncanny familiarity is key. The scene simulates the kinds of spaces where disturbing content is consumed casually, half-watched, scrolled past, shrugged off. “I wanted to simulate the spaces where we mindlessly consume,” she says, “like absentmindedly picking up a magazine while in a dentist waiting room.” Here, instead of glossy celebrity gossip, you’re handed a zine. Inside: a full transcript of Kennedy’s drunken ramblings. It’s not edited. That’s the point.

Reading a breakdown

The zine renders her intoxicated speech in raw, unmediated text, pauses, confusion, half-thoughts. It strips away tone and body language to reveal language at its most disjointed and vulnerable. “I express at various points to the camera that I am scared and confused,” she says. “I think having that spelled out adds more context and meaning.” The title itself, “This Is Your Break”, comes from that transcript. A line spoken to her during the video. Consent, Control, and Surveillance Displaying this footage wasn’t a flippant decision. Kennedy was present at the installation nearly the entire time it was on view. When she wasn’t, someone else was there to monitor the space. Even online, she’s cautious, never sharing clips that are too exposing. So where does she draw the line between documentation and exploitation? That question hangs over the work, intentionally unanswered. But one thing is clear: she’s reclaiming control of a moment when she had none. “If someone watches only thirty seconds,” she says, “I would want them to consider their own compliance in, and attitude towards, the gender disparity in drinking by briefly interrogating the feeling of unease at looking at a young drunk girl.”

A feminist lineage

This Is Your Break draws power from a feminist tradition that treats the personal as political. Kennedy cites the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles and second-wave feminist art that exposes inequality inside the domestic sphere. More recently, she references Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, a film that weaponises female vulnerability to hold predators accountable. There is a white knight syndrome out there,” she observes. “Younger, physically or emotionally weaker women become targets for men who think they can save or protect them.” The real violence, she suggests, is when that desire is fetishised, when vulnerability itself becomes the object of male fascination.

What comes next

While the work is anchored in a single night, Kennedy says its themes won’t be left behind. She plans to merge This Is Your Break with her earlier project Eighteen, to explore how vulnerability, whether from youth, inexperience, intoxication, or isolation, is warped into desirability and projected onto women.
“I want to lean into exploring the themes of vulnerability in its many forms… to the point at which those things are sometimes put on women and distorted… in the form of idealisation and creating a woman who isn’t there.”

Not a cautionary tale

Kennedy’s work isn’t a warning against drinking. It isn’t a lecture about empowerment. It’s something more unsettling. It lays bare the quiet cultural agreement that women who let their guard down - at parties, online, on camera - become fair game. And then it asks, with stunning honesty, what we’re really doing when we choose to look. “Empowerment,” Kennedy says, “means becoming stronger and more confident… but the threats that accompany it are not nearly as fair as we’d like them to be.” Her work doesn’t offer comfort. It offers clarity. And you can’t look away from it.

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