German-born Madeleine Kelly, who arrived in Australia in 1980, is a visual artist who primarily works in painting. Her mother is Peruvian/Italian, and her father is Australian. She majored with 1st class Honours 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. Titled Picturing Archaeologies: The Meta-archaic aesthetic, Kelly’s dissertation 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 creative work explores the materiality of images – in particular painting, as an earthen testimony figured from the ground that speaks of the primal frontiers of art, such as material transformation, as well as environmental contingencies. In this context, her work avoids dogmatism by depicting protean and rubric worlds.
Madeleine Kelly has been invited to exhibit in both public and private spaces, including Primavera 2005 curated by Felicity Fenner at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and Ten Years of Contemporary Art: The James C Sourris Collection 2012 at the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art. She has won several awards including the Melville Haysom Memorial Art Scholarship, and the 2004 Churchie Prize for Emerging Art. In 2005 she was the recipient of the Australia Council’s Paris Studio Residency, and in 2011 she received an Australia Council established artist’s grant for New Work. Her works have entered many public collections in Australia, including The Gallery of Modern Art/Queensland Art Gallery and several permanent university collections. She is represented by one of Australia’s premier contemporary art dealers, Milani Gallery, Brisbane, QLD, and lectures visual art at the University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia.
Statement:
In my work I explore the materiality of things and seek to produce affects whereby the evocative nature of oil paint depicts translucent and transparent forms, outlines, shadows and parts that function as sub-units, for example the diffusive layered tissues of membranes. Layers of paint build up strata and superimposed in order to create narratives that suggest the structural affinities between the micro and macro, and the ways in which materiality is in a constant state of growth, flux and decay. In doing so I explore diversity, fragmentation and the grotesque as positive tropes in order to rupture linear forms of knowledge and challenge dominant subjects of representation. In many of my works, the form of the crevice functions in a number of conceptual ways; its form lends shape to the split, and the dialectic of the split—a term that implies rupture — or in this case a contemplation of an archive.
From an art-historical perspective, my early works quote the language of the symbolists who were concerned with energy and entropy, namely the first and second laws of thermodynamics, while my later works also focus on conflating myth, archaeology and natural resources. I am also interested in exploring themes of subjectivity, fragmentation and the construction, connotation and application of language. The Surface of Language used as its starting point a collection of stones containing a distinct line of quartz. This ‘law of the line’, combined with the form of the stone, was used to conceive the symbolic references. This work embodies the rubs between words and images, as well as the creation and destruction of knowledge.
