Why I have chosen to present my assignment on Mary Kelly

I have chosen to present my assignment on Mary Kelly, an American conceptual artist and writer, as I developed an affinity with her work while struggling to articulate my statement of practice for the graduate catalogue. While researching the list of suggested critics for this class, I came across Kelly’s description of her own work on her website. Within the first sentence, Kelly put into words what I had been struggling to articulate about my own practice.

 “Mary Kelly is known for her project based work, addressing questions of sexuality, identity and historical memory in the form of large-scale narrative installations”. (1)

Interim Part I: Corpus, 1984 - 85
Laminated photo positive, silkscreen, acrylic on Plexiglass
Installation View, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 1990
from http://www.marykellyartist.com/interim.html

Although I wouldn’t say my own work addresses sexuality, it definitely seeks to explore identity and historical memory through installation. Despite the fact that my major is printmaking, my work tends to be more interdisciplinary and installation-based with only an element of printmaking included. I initially admired Kelly’s work for purely aesthetic reasons regardless of the medium she used. Yet on closer inspection of her work, I was pleased to see that she also uses an element of screenprinting (my medium of choice) in works such as Interim (1984-89) and Gloria Patri (1992). This has been quite a monumental discovery for me as I have not come across many artists who use printmaking in anything other than the traditional sense (ie: two dimensional artworks on paper). 

Love Songs 2005 - 2007
Installation View, Neue Galarie, Documenta 12, Kassel, Germany, 1990
from http://www.marykellyartist.com/love_songs.html

Kelly is currently the professor of Art at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her artworks have been exhibited internationally and are a part of worldwide collections. Her writings on feminist and postmodern theory are also highly regarded. To sum up her work in my own words, I believe Kelly has addressed three key themes across her most well known artworks: Feminism (seen in works such as: Interim, Circa 1968, Love Songs), War (seen in works such as: Gloria Patri, Mea Culpa, The Balland of Kastriot Rexhepi and Habitus) and collective memory (a process of collection and documentation I’ve found throughout all of her work). It is these themes along with Kelly’s book of collective writings Imaging Desire, that I wish to explore further and present for my assignment.

Kelly has been touted as a staunch feminist and from my initial investigations, I can understand why this is so. Yet I wish to approach her work more holistically rather than from a feminist angle. Through thorough research of an artist and critic who is labelled as a feminist, I hope I might be able to pinpoint why I am drawn to feminist artists despite the fact that I do not create feminist art.  I also hope that this initial connection I have found so far with Kelly’s work will develop further to enable me to give a cohesive and enthusiastic presentation later this year as well as inspiring my own practice as it has done in inspiring my artistic statement.

Jessica Row
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(1) excerpt from http://www.marykellyartist.com