The Salt House - Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast (9th Jan - 22nd Feb, 2020)
In this exhibition subject matter, materials and process are closely linked. Kelly has drawn on memory and recollections that have triggered a series of responses exploring ideas around the nature of personal memory, space and childhood. The title images offers multiple versions of a recalled out-of-bounds building housing piles of salt, situated at a railway track across the field from where the artist grew up in the West Country, England. Small square black & white photographs taken by the artist’s mother or father in the early 1960’s, became the catalyst for pondering the past. Salt House appears in one photograph, as an indistinct grey shape in the far background. The resonance of salt in the process of preservation is not lost on the artist. Using the process of contouring a form revealing a ‘negative space’, what is invisible can be made visible. The form of the salt House suspended within an imaginary world. The large works are created in charcoal on translucent paper – a problematic surface to receive the charcoal since it easily slides off its surface and can slightly mute marks. Also challenging is the task of retaining the inner spaces void of marks or charcoal dust.