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

The works in Hollow Mark are partly inspired by contemporary considerations of where painting might begin or end. The title is drawn from Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) and suggests absence, gaps in knowledge, and things that are unspoken. The work also seeks to test light’s capacity to represent human relations to environments both natural and artificial, as a process of accumulation; an archaeology of being.

The painting uses the image-laden aspects of Foucault’s archaeological metaphor imaginatively to explore complex ways of seeing and knowing. This visual-aesthetic translation of Foucault’s archaeological method is not without irony. Formally, the works contain anamorphic distortion, an emphasis on rupture, treacherous doubling and discontinuity, all arranged as ‘archaeological constellations’.