MARY KELLY

The exhibition opens with the first European presentation of World on Fire Timeline (2020), representing a coda to three decades of Kelly’s work exploring global conflict and its connection with personal experience. The central narrative – beginning with the arms race in 1949, through to civil rights and anti-war protests in the aftermath of 1968, and ending with the climate crisis in the present – is interspersed with generation-defining events from Kelly’s life, such as the births of her son and her grandson. The work registers the effect of protest on the hypothetical midnight of the Doomsday Clock. Despite traversing 71 years, the timeline is non-linear; remixed and recycled elements serve to emphasise the reappearance of the past in our present moment. The assembled fragments within the Timeline reflect Kelly’s interests and the themes she has developed in the last twenty years of her project-based work, including extracts from_News from Home_ (2017),7 Days (2012-2016), and the Circa Trilogy (2004-2017).

Formally, Timeline marks the first time that Kelly has combined collage with her signature compressed lint medium. A technique inaugurated by the artist in 1999, it offers a compelling means of representing the ways in which the traumatic residue of historical events is filtered through the everyday. Kelly’s reworking of archival texts and images is intensely involved with both material process and duration. Individual units of compressed lint are cast in the filter screen of a domestic dryer over several months and hundreds of washing cycles, then assembled as large panels of low relief. For the artist, repetition is a performative act of remembering and potentially working through the personal and political meanings of those events.

Presented alongside Timeline are examples from the three bodies of work it references_. Circa 2011_ (2016) is a major work in compressed lint and the final part of Kelly’s Circa trilogy, which explores the documentation of events in Western history via mediated imagery. It draws on the prolific, and often anonymous, internet images of the Arab Spring pro-democracy demonstrations, specifically in Tahrir Square in Cairo before the military takeover in 2011. Revealing an aesthetic shift from the curated images that shape our recollection of 20th century events, the work explores the advent of ‘citizen journalism’: vast networks of photographs taken with mobile phones that proliferate across the internet. Light noise projected onto the lint recalls the glare of a computer screen. Like memory, the image often slips into illegibility, highlighting and obscuring the inaccessible zones of the past. And, true to the trilogy’s title, the combination of lint and noise suggests imprecision, blurring, and an inescapable ambiguity.

In her work, Kelly asks what defines an era, and for whom, not only as political discourse, but also as trace or residue of the personal lives that were defined by it. News from Home comprises three letters from Kelly’s archive, dating from her time living in London in the 1970s. Two examples from the series are on view: London 1974 gives a fleeting glimpse of communal living – women negotiating their commitment to activism with childcare, illness, accidents and domesticity – while Tucson 1972 addresses economic survival, alternative ways of living and political protest in the context of an escalating war in Vietnam. Likewise, two intimately scaled works, the covers of Life, April 1945 (2014), documenting the aftermath of the atomic bomb, and Shrew, December, 1970 (2017), connecting global conflict and feminist action, are subjects that still resonate today.

Courtesy Pippy Houldsworth Gallery.