Angela Hennessy's sculpture and installations often involve materials transformed beyond recognition. Delicate and destructive manipulations of velvet appear as washes of ink and smudges of charcoal, a spot of mold or a clump of hair. Her objects feel as if they might get up and crawl away. Their ambiguous nature arouses the desire to touch, to understand not by logic, but by tactile experience, from one body to another. Much of her work is based on the act of unraveling black velvet, a slang term for black women; a material rich in references to luxury, labor, and sensuality. The color black has emerged as a recurring theme in her practice as both an indication of death and a category of racial identification. Mapping internal landscapes of disorder, her work engages in dialogues of drawing and sculpture. Currently, she is exploring blackness as a state of being, prone to psychological vulnerabilities.