Laura Kelly
Via work straddling the drawing/sculpture divide and ranging in scale from small wall pieces to large installations, Laura Kelly explores themes of flux, fragmentation and impermanence through her experimental landscape drawings. She presents drawing as a form of spectacle using materials including paper, ink, graphite, tape, cord and paint and watercolour. Her work has a strong compositional element arising from her original background in painting and often alludes to the pictorial landscape tradition. Underpinning it all is an interplay between form, surface, materiality and markmaking to create a sensation of transience, perceptual ambiguity and fragile attachment.
She has a BA Fine Art (Painting), NCAD, Dublin (1986); MA Visual Arts Practices, IADT, Dublin (2010); MA in Image Synthesis & Computer Animation, Middlesex University, UK,(1991); and also holds a BA in Natural Sciences,Trinity College, Dublin.
Solo shows include ShoutySnowEchoooo (2025), Ottawa School of Art, Canada;
_BergScapessss….. (2024), Linenhall Gallery, Castlebar, Co Mayo; ShoutySnowEcho (2022), Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray, Co Wicklow; Edgelands (2017), 126 Gallery, Galway; and Prospect (2013), Limerick City Gallery, Limerick. She has participated in numerous curated group shows in Ireland and the UK and her work is represented in public and private collections in Ireland and England.
Awards include international residencies at the Banff Centre for Creativity and the Arts, Canada (2024 and 2016) and the Vermont Studio Center, USA (2018); Firestation Studios & Workshop Sculpture Award (2018), Dublin; Leitrim Sculpture Centre Professional Development Award (2018); RHA Studio Award (2014), Dublin. She has been funded by The Arts Council of Ireland, Culture Ireland and Wicklow Arts Office.
Artist Statement
Laura Kelly’s experimental drawings respond to landscape through themes of flux, fragmentation and impermanence.
There is a precarity to her work – it conveys a coming-apartness while simultaneously just about holding together, and also an underlying concern for the perilous state of the natural environment. She invites the viewer to re-consider the experience of landscape as something elusive and uncontainable. Framing is frequently discarded. In contrast to our world of digital devices and their rectangular viewing formats, her work ruptures the conventional way of looking and spills beyond any attempt at proposing boundaries in much the same way that the natural world defies containment.
Past work has alluded to snow-cover and its role in creating ambiguity in our perception of a landscape and originates from research in snow-covered landscapes during Winter Residency Awards at the Banff Centre for the Arts & Creativity, Canada and Vermont Studio Center, USA.
Combining assemblages of materials into drawing installations, she generally works on a large-scale. Hers is mainly an additive process – one of building up surfaces and also volume. Materials include paper, plastic, acetate, cardboard, wood, cord, tape, cellophane, fabric, paint, ink and pencil. She then subjects them to repetitive acts of drawing, mark-making, layering, folding, crumpling, tearing, cutting & assembling.
She considers her installations as temporary stagings in a specific space that choreograph how a viewer experiences that space. Japanese spatial aesthetics play a strong role and the notion of appreciating form while a viewer is in motion but detail while at rest is key. Vertical and horizontal movement within the pieces is also important to animate the viewing process, as is a desire to satisfy different vantage points. Her work has a strong compositional element arising from her original background in Painting.
Overall, her materials & processes mirror the flux present in the natural world. Its provisional nature and an animated sense of flow & movement is visible in all her work.