Hollow Mark: the empyting out of Madeleine Kelly's new paintings

Griffith University Art Gallery

7 October - 13 November 2011

Review by Nicola Scott

Madeleine Kelly’s work over the past few years has demonstrated a commitment to experimentation, not only in terms of her materials, but in her painting techniques and conceptual concerns. Continuing this trend, her latest show, Hollow Mark, comprises not only new paintings on canvas and board, but also painted fibreglass resin panels, a vitrine of found objects and works on paper, a number of lightbox pieces, and two works on sailcloth. There is also an enclosed corridor-style installation, Erscheinen (to appear), that visitors walk through to observe backlit images Kelly created by making dots and tears in foamcore (this work was previously shown in the exhibition at Milani gallery). To provide a considered review of the entire show would require more words than I have, but a look at her new paintings on canvas raises some potential pros and cons in her evolving practice.

While Kelly’s ongoing conceptual concerns – rituals of labour and consumption, conflicts over finite resources, and the troubled relationship between humans and the natural environment – are clearly present in these new works, her approach to conveying these ideas are now drawn out thematically through the central idea of the mirror (1). As Abigail Fitzsimmons catalogue essay elaborates, this approach to mirroring is three-fold: the doubled, reflected image; anamorphism, which traditionally uses a mirror to create a distortion of the single-point perspectival vision dominating Western history and contemporary visual culture; and a binocular focus that creates a doubled point of view, either in framing the image or within the image itself (2). These references to dualism, self-reflexivity and difference continue Kelly’s allusions to alternative perspectives or voices in history and in contemporary culture, pointing to, “absences, or gaps in knowledge – ideas that are never recorded by the governing powers in history” (3).

It is perhaps this shift in Kelly’s conception of her paintings, as not so much a window onto another realm as a reflecting surface that has produced a shift in her organisation of pictorial space that makes the exhibition title, Hollow Mark, surprisingly descriptive. While Kelly has favoured smooth, flat surfaces before, she has previously created the illusion of a kind of haptic space within or beneath this surface layer- a slippage between near and far, a synthesis of forms, and a complex interplay of thin, glaze-like layers – that creates the illusion of another world in which her signature blend of the mythical and the modern collide. In Hollow Mark this slippage of space and form is largely gone, moving away from the collision of depth and surface that her earlier works depict. The works are larger that Kelly’s previous shows, perhaps to fill the larger space of the QCA gallery, and while a few feature painterly brushwork, in general large fields of flat colour fill the canvases, surrounding a central figure or figures, sometimes anthropomorphised forms – bones, sponges, which are combined in various works with either focus-drawing symbols (a hammer and sickle) or text. While I found this inclusion of symbology a tad disjointed or distracting, the text plays cleverly on ideas of power and use of resources – whether this involves knowledge or the natural environment -  in contemporary Capitalist society. It is the lack of integration between these words or symbols and the other forms and planes of her paintings that I miss in these new paintings, but then this is what I like in paintings generally. Personal predilections aside, Kelly has clearly altered her painting strategies deliberately to emphasise her focus on the mirror, and cleverly investigates her new concerns in a way that is imaginative and unsettling, (“kookily Kelly”, as Rex Butler said) if potentially more didactic or heavy-handed with the symbology in some works.

Above all, and initial twang of disappointment aside, I think the continual evolution of Kelly’s practice is a vital part of what continues to make her work unpredictable, interesting and relevant, both visually and conceptually. It may be shallower spatially, but it is never stagnant.  

1. In conversation with the artist, exhibition opening at QCA Gallery, 7 October 2011.
2. Fitzgibbons, A 2011, 'An Alchemy of Reflection', Hollow Mark exhibition catalogue, Griffith Artworks, Griffith University, Brisbane.
3. Kelly in Fitzgibbons, A 2011, 'An Alchemy of Reflection', Hollow Mark exhibition catalogue, Griffith Artworks, Griffith University, Brisbane.