Caroline Kennedy-McCracken {aka Caroline Kennedy} is an Australian artist born in Melbourne[1]. She is a painter, sculptor and singer-songwriter. She is married to fellow musician Pete McCracken.
As a musician, she has been a member of several bands, including indie band The Plums, pop/rock band Deadstar and country-tinged duo The Tulips.
As a visual artist she incorporates a range of methods in her approach to making, including drawing, painting, installation, collage, recording, performance, and sculpture using found objects.
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Kennedy-McCracken studied at Melbourne University in the arts department during the early nineties, before she left to pursue a career in bands and as a painter.
In 2009 she graduated from the Master of Fine Art program at RMIT University.
Regarded as a colourist, most of Kennedy-McCracken’s work, including her lyrics and installations, investigate the world from a painting perspective. She uses both small and monumental scales in her work, and explores themes to do with values, nostalgia, memory, culture, representation and nature.
She was shortlisted for The Siemens RMIT awards in 2009, for her piece ‘Notation’, made from clothes horses and pegs.
Caroline performs under her own name but through the nineties also performed in a number of other short-lived bands, including The Kicksilvers, The Caroline Kennedy Conspiracy and Salon Baby (with Penny Ikinger), to name a few.
She has written songs with, or for, many other artists including Pete McCracken, Kim Salmon, Vika and Linda Bull, Penny Ikinger, Charlie Marshall, Angie Hart and Mark Seymour. As a songwriter she has been nominated for several ARIA awards.
She has sung on records by Crow, Charlie Marshall and The Body Electric, and on Kim Salmon and the Surrealists’ record ‘Ya Gotta Let Me Do My Thing’. She collaborated in 2009 with Mick Turner and Jim White of the Dirty Three, on their Tren Brothers single, ‘Sometimes’, which she co-wrote and sang.
Formed in 1992 The Plums were an independent four-piece group based around the songwriting of Caroline Kennedy and guitarist Steve Moffat. The epic effected guitars, driving drums of Shamus Goble and inventive melodic bass of Pete McCracken supported the sweetly leftist delivery of Kennedy. Influenced as much by Sonic Youth as The Sundays, the band were fiercely independent and subcultural, despite their pop sound. Live, the band were unpredictable and patchy, with flashes of brilliance.
The band were signed to Mushroom's temptation label soon after they recorded their first ep Au Revoir Sex Kitten. They went on to record an ep Read All Over, followed by an album Gun which was picked up and played by national broadcaster JJJ. Their last recording was an ep Heavenly, which was released as the band broke up.
See Deadstar for the main article on the topic
Deadstar was initially a side-project for Caroline Kennedy and Hunters and Collectors guitarist Barry Palmer, who invited Caroline into the studio to write melodies and lyrics over tracts of guitar music he had recorded for a short film. The collaboration worked immediately and what had been film music became, with the addition of Kennedy-McCracken’s lyrics and melodies, the band's first album. The band released three albums and a "best of" compilation, with mixed success and broke up in 1999.
Other members of the band were (at different times) Pete McCracken (bass), Michael den Elzen (guitar; ex-Schnell Fenster), and ex-Crowded House members Peter Jones (drums) and Nick Seymour (bass).
A collaboration with husband Pete McCracken, The Tulips were formed in 2002, and made one ep [self-titled] and two albums, 2003’s In the Honeycone and 2005's Free Like a Bird recorded with Tony Cohen, which was never commercially released.[2][3] Other early members of The Tulips included Jane McCracken and Graeme Cameron.