This exhibition provided insight into Madeleine Kelly: Open Studio by presenting an ecology of art, threads and life. It explored the idea of weaving what we see with what we know and dream. The images wove disparate ideas together and entwined formations of webs, wombs and patterns to remind us that many species form a fabric with a key material thread. This interconnection is crucial, showing how the liveliness of an artwork can extend to that of the living planet.

— Madeleine Kelly

Threads were among the earliest transmitters of meaning’, said Bauhaus artist Anni Albers. In these prints Albers conjoins graphic images with those of Andean textile design. The lines are enlivened through colour and interchanging rhythm. Albers dedicated her book On Weaving (1965) to the weavers of ancient Peru

The long and pointed beak of this bird suggests it is a hummingbird. In this work we see an interlacing of temporal and spatial dimensions. In the pre-Columbian world, the bird was vested with supernatural features and represented the sky, nighttime, war and darkness. The Nasca culture believed that animals inhabit a parallel world and exert influence over human life. Today such a belief system would certainly keep humanity in check. The synthetic character of the bird is a result of it being forced to remain within the bounds of the rectilinear structure formed by the intersection of the warp and the weft.

This textile, courtesy of the ‘Good Shepard Trading Circle’, Brisbane, was woven by women working for the organisation ‘Creation Agustina Rivas, for the promotion and capacitation of the woman Kcauri – Cusco Peru’. It contains a compositional logic whereby inversions, oppositions and reversals of the same symbols create a kind of syntax, pattern and typological imagery. Image and written language appear to conflate.

This pot from New Mexico features prehistoric bird design patterns composed of abstract wing and feather motifs that have been passed down through generations. In many cultures, textile designs were often transferred to the surface of ceramic vessels where they retained their abstract appearance.

In the pre-Columbian world the sky, earth and underground were represented by the bird, the feline and the snake. The Feline symbolizes might.

Window Bandit is based on a photograph of a potter wasp trying to escape through my studio window, battling its reflection. These wasps, which are in the family Vespidae, build mud pot nests.

Circles and lines enliven many of these works. They contain structural affinities between formal radiation and the sun. The sun’s energy exists and transforms across any distance and time, illuminating and providing photons vital to plant growth. 

As if yearning for enlightenment, three lamps gather together in deep thought. Bodily connotations ride on domestic ones. Their bent necks and peering eyes suggest they are oculate beings. Though the lamps can in no way see, they express the paradoxical coincidence that the sun, emitter of light, appears as the eye, receiver of light. 

The cross-contour lines in Ay-O’s ‘Finger Box’ were inspired by looking through a prism. Like a spider that spins its web, a figure pulls coloured thread from its womb, perhaps to create coloured copies of itself, or further spin its landscape. One might go so far as to say the work illustrates the idea that the matter of the womb is derived from the maternal-feminine, the word ‘matter’ itself attaining meaning from the word ‘maternal’. This work is poignant as it points to the politics of reproduction that recognises the multiple dimensions of human life

The form of a black radiating sun throws beams over a spindly landscape of filaments. Petal-like forms wilt towards a group of biomorphic frenzied figures. Without walls or borders, their figures metamorphosise or diffuse into their grounds. The picture shows forms living in kinship differently from that which we presently see, suggesting a world beyond the myopia of the individual body.

This sundew’s tiny arms explode like fireworks and terminate in sticky filaments; numerous mini replicas of each other. Hall’s work draws attention to structural affinities between the micro and the macro.

The legs of a half translucent figure seem to float before the surface of a pool. This work, made during my third year of study at the Queensland College of Art, was somewhat inspired by the evocative, existential presence of Madonna Staunton’s work made from clothing. I initially learned of Donna’s work through an exhibition at the Queensland Art Gallery. Later I was lucky to work with her in her home studio at Bennett Road, The Gap, where I grew up.

‘What is left over after the business of living is what interests me’, said Donna Staunton. Donna’s aim was to enliven what she called ‘inert matter’. Here the clothing’s material appears tactile but also doubles as a kind of psychological skin. The red thread of life recalls a bloodline—an unravelling of what it means to be human.

My book Forms of Agency 2017 played on on a timed loop in the gallery space.  The first half of the book features images of the women who worked at the Leipzig Cotton Mill during the GDR juxtaposed beside images of Peruvian textiles and art I have photographed while doing the rounds of galleries around the world. The second half features a work I produced during a residency at the Leipzig International Art Program, 2016. When researching the history of the Leipzig Spinnerei’s cotton production and the role of the women who worked in the mill, I was drawn to experimenting with woven fabrics. I made a series of 18 frottages of kitchen stoves on wool, cotton and nylon. Each image appears as a 1:1 blueprint or diagram and corresponds to our corporeal expectations. As a collection, they resemble skins, eyes and breasts, and also appear as human bodies. Their rather rigid typology suggests a canon of allowable forms to which our bodies are forced to conform, as well as the labour of the female body – as domestic, ruled and sexual.

In my animation Net casting 2020, liveliness unfolds through many logics and layers. An ecology of art, affinities and matter entangles boundaries between human beings and other species. Bird, frog and insect calls, as well as everyday acoustic noises, accompany the accumulation of shapes into patterns; signifiers of two perceptual worlds are superimposed and interlaced into spatial–temporal affinities. The relationship between the transformation of matter, ecology and painting is made explicit. The animation is named after a net casting spider that I observed as she patiently sat and watched the woven scroll/empty canvas/blank screen before her — a casting net to catch prey, like an artist waiting to problem find, not just problem solve.

Net casting (still) 2020 / High-definition video, colour, mono, 6:30 minutes (approx.) Link: https://vimeo.com/470836939

Madeleine Kelly’s Painterly Morphology

Now lost somewhere in the annals of art history, it is a lesser known fact that Cubism at the time of its “invention” after 1907 was considered by its exponents and defenders as a realism. Perhaps the diminishment of this notion is because it is so hard to understand or justify. Yet it helps to explain that Cubism was not just a style, it was both a lens and a technique to define the world, to disclose the essences of forms as they existed in both time and space. It also helps to remind us that every major phase of painting has to be conceived in terms of invention, whether that be that of oil paint, one-point-perspective, down to the outlines of bison on a cave wall.

To many artists, a particular approach to painterly style is therefore not just a layer over nature but communion with its mechanisms: the workings of the picture in all its mysterious elements are a mirror to the ineffable operations of nature. Nature as not a spectacle, after all, it is the complex machine that always eludes us because we are both separate from and seamless with it. This is, I think, the best way of approaching Madeleine Kelly’s current work, namely as a means of exposing not just how things in the world are seen, but how it is that they work.

For that reason, it is only natural that this work turns to the vitalism of the artists,philosophers and poets active in the early twentieth century, ranging to the Orphist (Kupka) and Futurist (Balla and Boccioni) artists to Henri Bergson and W. B. Yeats. The title of this suite of works, What the Centre Cannot Hold derives from his poem, “The Second Coming” (1919) which is a warning against the control over the world.Bergson conceived the world and the cosmos as élan vitale, an energetics that emphasised the forces of animation and creation. Sound, movement, propulsion, creation and destruction, must all be seen as interconnected. Look at a cube of sugar, Berson advised, not as an isolated object, but rather conceive of it as the sugar cane before and its dissolution in your cup of coffee afterward. Things are to be seen in terms of their methods of mutation, as causal flow.

Window Bandit may be a coda for the exhibition, two wasps in mirror image, made after the artist witnessed one banging against a window pane. While the anecdotal starting point is a kind of absurdist, Sisyphean hopelessness, the texture and vibrancy of the work tells of something completely different. The angular and swirled layerings of opaque and diaphanous white allow us to sense the movement, the persistence of the insect, the bang on the window-pane, the interplay between different masses. The reflection of the wasp is emblematic of the act of painting itself, as a reflection of all these dynamic forces through abstractions that are resolved as a determinate aesthetic object. Knowing this makes it easier to interpret Silent Scream, a man listening intently to a fragment of a Greco-Roman sculpture, where the scream is not to be taken
literally but more as an exchange between the time past that the sculpture embodies, and what the man is imagining about it.

Kelly’s approach to painting is one that begins with a series of idetic and other sensory compulsions—an aesthetic constellation not unlike a dream, but far more patiently considered—that form the basis of what may transpireon the canvas. These elements are then laid down, with the expectation that the answer to their configuration will come in the struggle requisite to themaking. It is her intention not to start too schematically, but to discover and to resolve. There is something of an evolutionist narrative here, for Nature, too, does not always make the best or the most logical creations, yetthrough time and interaction, some form of resolution takes place.Paintings such as Stair Ghostand No Comfort in the Cityare always a balancing act between understanding what it is to be in and to see the world, and the process of painting itself.

In Axis of Dream, a figure just left of centre stands embedded within some industrial casing, which on second examination turns out to be a horse. Their bodies are not so much intertwined asbeingfused together in communion, the faces of both reserved and calm as a resultless of resignation than of care and kindness. Then, emerging from a shallow field on the right, intercalated with interlocking serpentine pipes, looms the ghost-like shape of another horse coming towards them. Overhead are sprays of orchid-cum-insects, their weightlessness and movement relayed through a rich play of blue graphic diamonds and circles of beige and white. It is a mistake to call these images surreal, except insofar as anything that is vaguely outlandish or unusual can connote a dream. Instead, if there is a more overarching message to be drawn from all of this work it is that yes, we are faced with some very serious problems because of what we have done to our world. And yes, we must find some very big solutions that are logistical and scientific.

But there other strategies afoot, and these are to listen, to wait, to watch, all of which will finally lead us to discover the many silent voices with which the world speaks to us. We will then respond to our world in a more considered way, and with more sensitivity.

Dr Adam Geczy 2018

ARTIST STATEMENT

Spin out, spun in explores the aesthetic potential of circles, light and colour in relation to modernism’s legacy — an inherited, unstable environmental and socioeconomic ground. The title reflects the sense of disorientation associated with the pursuit of material and cosmic idealism in a society gravely ‘high’ on entropy.

In the paintings, modernist tropes are re contextualised to imply the contours of reality, organisms, eyes and their objects. In Me and my rhythm box, figures are inverted and reversed to evoke a syntax suggestive of the contingency of knowledge. The rhythm box suggests ecological movement, the endless repetition of economic systems or a political fight against the direction ‘progress’ is heading.

The kinetic work, Mama Ocllo, transforms painting into an immersive spatio-temporal and sonic field. Drawing from the work of James Clerk Maxwell, who employed spinning disks to explore the differences in mixing light and mixing pigments, the work engages with fundamental issues of colour perception that bring aesthetics into the scientific fields of optics and physiology. In Incan mythology, Mama Ocllo, a fertility goddess, taught women the art of spinning thread. Her magical pre-modern origin reflects the generative revolutions of the structure. In this work, light is a metaphoric thread of vibrant transitions reflected from spinning different parts of the coloured spectrum, yet the harmonic vibration and wailing sound suggests humanity’s low blow on natural systems. This work also finds precedents in recent projects with similar rotating disks by Tobias Rehberger and Olafur Eliasson and references Marcel Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema and Rotoreliefs, and Sonia and Robert Delaunay’s vibrant Orphic compositions.

In the series of bird paintings, colour and vision are interlinked to suggest co evolution and life forces that are ever-responding and mixing at the threshold of our awareness. For instance, In Stealing other artists’ ideas (Painting for Mike), the roosters in Mike Kelley’s Cocks and Balls (1988) textile are replaced with eastern koels. Part of the cuckoo family, the birds lay their eggs in the nests of other birds species who raise the cuckoo chicks as their own. Likewise, by using the archive of art, artists form symbiotic or parasitic relationships with the archive of art.

In Canberra birds: Cute craft for the painting archive, part of an ongoing series examining the spectra of birds, bird patterning and colouration are rendered with encaustic wax painting on Tetra Paks. The time consuming activity is one in which living labour adds value to used packaging. It’s a gesture against the logic of an economic rationalism that deems activities like painting redundant.

Madeleine Kelly, January 2019

Inspired by the symbolic elements and motifs that encode Peruvian textile imagery with meaning and compositional logic, these paintings evoke a sense of the known through their interconnected patterns and typological imagery. By working within the constraints of certain geometric patterns, I challenge myself to formally interlace richly complex ways of seeing and knowing. This iconographic system allows me to connect abstract, expressive and representational painting in such a way that inter-iconic relationships emerge and give rise to a multitude of different aesthetics. At times, resulting crystalline effects extend living forms into geology and the irregular geometry of my previous works. The paintings present structural affinities between the figures and their grounds that suggest forms of knowing are contingent on the conditions from which they emerge. The title of the exhibition – Forms of Agency – reflects this relationship between textiles, painting and agency.

The paintings hence bring disparate fields together via geometric abstraction. Geometric motifs suggest how knowledge includes and excludes, and is shaped and built. Their separating lines provide me with a space to explore how forms can both shape and are shaped by structures, including ideological ones, such as the utopian promise of consumer culture. Each painting features the trace of a domestic object that appears as a 1:1 blueprint or diagram and corresponds to our corporeal expectations. Their structures inspire analogy and give rise to metaphor and association, and are a counterpoint to the physicality of my bird sculptures, which were squeezed into the rectilinear formations of Tetra Paks. The process of finding forms and weaving imagery into their patterns is my way of understanding the world, of continuously determining relations.

The Pollinator was initially inspired by the act of pollinating pumpkin flowers using my paintbrush. Afterwards I spent time admiring their forms while drawing them onto isomorphic paper. By making them conform to the triangular matrix their wilted petals appeared as sections of faceted crystal vessels or wombs, while their whole forms also reminded me of Giacomo Balla’s futurist flowers. The brush that enabled the flower to bear fruit was the same one that painted them. Yet in the image the brush appears as axe – as taker. The mineral and geometric structures allow the composition to grow like crystalline life forms. These structures become the vital life of the painting, crossing categories between human, plant and cultural object, while the doubling of archetypal figures and mythic architecture suggests genealogy and the fragmented mirroring of meaning through time.

Allowable forms and unconscious facts features the trace of a domestic oven that appears as a 1:1 blueprint or diagram and corresponds to our corporeal expectations. Its structure inspires analogy and give rise to metaphor and association. Circular stovetop plates resemble an egg, eyes and breasts while a slumped head, confronted by an eyeball/balloon/sperm, points to a troubled developmental stage for humanity. Bodily connotations ride on domestic ones.

The installation Existential Needs extends the surrealist content in my work. In this piece, I use frottage – a surrealist and ‘automatic’ method of creating images – to make rubbings of many stoves’ textured surfaces using oil stick on fabric. We see human bodies as stoves, and stoves as human bodies through visual analogies between the cultural artefact, that is the stove, and the natural form of the female body. The stove, which is traditionally a site associated with female labour, here literally becomes embodied into a sort of psychological and material skin. As art theorist Hans Belting suggests, in pictures, the skin of the body and the skin of the image are connected as a triad of image, body and medium. To extend the idea of the embodied image, I am working on a series of robe-like dresses for a performance in which figures are dressed as I am in the images above. These actors will further animate the traditional dualism between soul and the labour of the body.

Cooking Culture

The paintings in Cooking Culture depict dream-like settings inspired by the collage method. Figurative elements are set on transforming grounds to convey the constant flux, contradiction and entropy created in a ‘consuming’ world.

The Surface of Language seeks to embody the rubs between words and images, as well as the creation and destruction of knowledge. It informs and is informed by the work in other media, and used as its starting point a collection of stones containing a distinct line, or vein, of quartz. This ‘law of the line’, combined with the form of the stone, was used to conceive the symbolic references.

The surface of language rock poem 14

Smoten/broken/bloody/sea-sons/ greed/betokens/stub-born/reason
Full/fall/cat/call/worry/some/wind-wall
Scarcity/sabotage/curator/massage
To cross/to draw/to underscore
The/logic/of /an/uproar
Ideal/star/eyed/to/mark/+/blow
That/monu-meant/for/none/to/know
Now/threshing/floors/carry/his-story/too
Hands/that/tore/a-part/the/earth
Hands/that/bombed/like/terns
Awoke/an/eye/a/seed/like/egg
This/blinking/globe/embedded/red