Madeleine Kelly | The University of Sydney (original) (raw)

Biographical details

German-born Madeleine Kelly, who arrived in Australia in 1980, is a visual artist who primarily works in painting. She majored in Fine Art from the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University in 1999, and her practice-led PhD was conferred by the same institution in 2013. Her dissertation, entitled Picturing Archaeologies: The Meta-archaic aesthetic, examines the archaeological metaphor as an image-laden and mutable terrain. In particular, she engages – not without irony – with the descriptive capacity of philosopher Michel Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge. Her use of the archaeological metaphor focuses on the field of painting as composed of networks of aesthetic, topographic or historical positions. As such, her creative work explores the materiality of images as an earthen testimony figured from the ground, which speaks of the primal frontiers of art, such as material transformation, as well as environmental contingencies.

Kelly has been invited to exhibit in both public and private spaces, nationally and internationally, including GOMA Q: Contemporary Queensland Art (2015) at the Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), Brisbane; Ten Years of Contemporary Art: The James C Sourris Collection (2011), QAGOMA and Primavera 2005: Young Australian Artists, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Sydney. Recent international exhibitions venues include Spinnerei Werkschau, Leipzig, Germany (2018); Tapetenwerk Leipzig (2017) and Crane Arts Philadelphia, Philadelphia, USA (2011). She has attended residencies in Kongju, Korea; Paris, France and Leipzig and received support from the Australia Council for a number of projects. Kelly is represented by Milani Gallery, Brisbane, QLD.

Research interests

Kelly’s practice-led research primarily takes form as paintings. Their content is often poetic, metaphysical and oblique, despite the politics underpinning them. Within the field of painting, she is deeply interested in iconography, figuration, the pictorial and the materiality of painting both as an object and philosophical visual language. In this, she also focuses on the institutions that circulate it, such as aesthetics and art history. Her international research has focussed on French Symbolist painting and entropy, The New Leipzig School’s fusions of abstraction and figuration, and political walls and borders implied in Mexican Muralism.

While painting remains core to her practice, it often acquires its significance in its interrelation with other mediums such as light, sculpture and most recently, the symbolic elements and motifs that encode Peruvian textile imagery with meaning and compositional logic. In these recent works, the resulting pictorial effect is one where archetypal, mythological figures appear to embody the modernist languages of cubism and futurism. Here motifs connect the labour of the body to crystalline grounds that suggest non-human geological and mineral worlds.

In other works, such as her encaustic wax painted bird sculptures squashed from Tetra Paks, Kelly embodies a more expansive view of the potential for painting. Abstract planes of colour correspond to the unique colours found on birds and also connote the work of colour field painter Ellsworth Kelly, demonstrating how painting is manifested through fusions of the everyday and art history.

Kelly’s broader research is interdisciplinary and collaborative. By weaving art and science, she generates creative research and writing that intertwines multiple references to energy (fossil fuels, visible light, Terahertz Spectroscopy), plant pigments, animal mythology, archaeology, ethics, perception and creativity.

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