Kelly POWER
Merit Award 2010

work shown : Reckless Dark Desires
pencil on paper
36" x 28"
(click on picture to see larger image)

Project

The award would create openings for me in my career as an artist in a number of ways. I have been invited to produce a body of work for a solo show in Armagh in the summer of next year and need funds to help me produce a good quality show of work. And I would also like to have the means to set up and run a studio in a space that I have found in my home town of Waterford.

Artist Statement

My studio practice conveys the effort of controlling the unsettling macabre or ambiguous in the work, and is saturated by surrealist propensity to evade logical or realist associations.

The idea of rendering imagery in paint or drawing material is concerned with having less to do with a kind of overall detail and more to do with fragmentation, it's of importance to place emphasis on the imagination or fictional identity of my practice. There is also a recurring theme of displacement in the work, figures taken from one place (a photograph for example) and placed in a suspended space on the page. The removal of a more literal reference to place and context creates a tension between this and the very specific placement of the figure within the frame evoking notions of the ambiguous and sublime.

Punctured bodies are a recurring motif, and inconclusiveness permeates my work, in particular, the drawings. An unspoken violence lurks silently in the space frames and the viewer is placed in an unsettling position of the eerie feeling of invading the subject's privacy. The images are disquieting – a suggestive description as the images on the surface appear to be quite tranquil, but beneath the surface there is a troubling psychology in operation. These suspended climactic moments induce the issues of drama and anxiety, separating reality from this super real world.