Deborah Kelly

A mantis-headed, gloss-lipped, many-legged (and well-heeled) figure shimmies through the stars; a snake rests, with its knowing, around their waist. A second deific creature appears from beneath their skirt, to join them in the dance: they’re nude from the hips up, with flaming wings and arms akimbo. A white flower is a cat’s eye is the face of an owl staring into the dark; a waratah is a woman is a metronome marching forward. Kaleidoscopic, cosmic, prophetic, sensual (which is not only to say erotic) – these are The Gods of Tiny Things, 2019.

Here, Deborah Kelly’s collage characters are animated into ecstatic dance on the brink of political and environmental collapse. The Gods of Tiny Things was produced by attendees of a “collage camp” at Bundanon on Yuin Country, and forms part of Many Hands Make Life Work – Deborah Kelly and the Moving Image 2011–2021 at Maitland Regional Art Gallery. 

Kelly observes that her analogue figures “always want to dance, which is very hard when you’re made of paper.” She emphasises that the “legwork” of liberating them, as it were, is undertaken both by the functionalities of animation technology itself, and by her many collaborators (including Melody Pei Li, who animated Tiny Things and its sequel). If collage, as a medium, uniquely speaks a poetry of both fragmentation and proliferation, then it is the just form for Kelly’s work to take; allowing us to see its junctures plainly, it expresses a meeting of makers and matter. Animation, in which joints swing and tremble on their hinges, only draws the eye more emphatically to the collage’s nodes of intersection.

The syncretic symbology of Tiny Things, as well as its tactics of crowd-sourcing, underpin the many components of what Kelly calls “the biggest work of my life”: the founding of a “queer, insurrectionary, science fiction, climate change religion” through the CREATION project, 2020–ongoing. From around the time of Trump’s election to the US Presidency in 2016, Kelly began to ask in earnest “how to make the struggle for our only planet beautiful and alluring and hysterical, while high-pitched [climate] denialism paralyses every government on earth.” The work towards an answer to this question is both the process and the outcome of CREATION. 

The project has made a mulch of its media since its inception. It uses – take a deep breath – text, collage, video, costuming, music, dance, objects, workshops, and ritual practice to propose new (better) ways of being with a world in crisis, and may include food, scent, and possibly an album in the future, too. Kelly’s role is more as an instigator than a lone, heroic artist. She says this way of working is informed by having six younger sisters, as well as her involvement with the trade union movement as a young woman. Studying law as an undergraduate, she became involved with her peers’ feminist activities at the Working Women’s Centre of the ACTU, focusing on making union communications around the exploitation of home-based textile workers. Then, as now, her work was with and for her comrades and kin.

As the first act of CREATION, Kelly commissioned SJ Norman to compose an originary text, which became The Liturgy of the Saprophyte, from which all the rest proceeds. Writers, artists, and community leaders throughout the country have produced essays, theological reflections, poems, lyrics, and fiction in response to Norman’s liturgy. Many of these are published in The Book of Creation, 2022, funded by sales of CREATION holy cards, with Kelly’s collage-gods on one side and (the whole of) Norman’s liturgy on the other. This is a practical religion, after all: it’s animated by urgent political feeling, is structured by various modes of community engagement, and knows there’s no use trying to build a heaven anywhere other than on earth. 

Kelly’s show in Maitland follows an epic CREATION iteration further down the Hunter Valley at Newcastle’s The Lock-Up, and the Gala finale of the New Annual festival in October of this year (which themselves build on presentations at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia for The National 2021, and at the Sydney Opera House for All About Women, 2022). CREATION always responds to the needs and desires of local participants. In Newcastle, local Wiradjuri/Chinese–Australian poet Kerri Shying was commissioned to write The Mass of the Bees, which was composed as choral music by Lex Lindsay and performed by Newcastle musician Natasha Rusterholz to an ecstatic standing ovation. For Many Hands Make Life Work, though, the focus is squarely on the immersive display of video works, including For Creation, 2021 – the sequel to The Gods of Tiny Things – Beastliness, 2011, and Earthlings’ Greetings, 2015: an animated message to extra-terrestrials made with Christian J. Heinrich. 

This film finishes with a request regarding “contact” between human and other, possibly alien, beings: “We know you want to touch us on the soft insides, and this is, honestly, not entirely out of the question. After certain ritual preliminaries, ask nicely. And, please, be slippery.” Such is the place of earthly delight in all of Kelly’s works – “We’re not going anywhere,” she says, “if it isn’t a pleasure for us.” Kelly’s filmic bodies fruit and decay, writhe and blossom in queer, interspecies chorus. They remind us that film is a material medium just like any other – “Film editing is a bodily experience too: it’s the strung-out feeling of all-day screen time, of too much coffee, of toast for dinner,” Kelly says. They remind us that nothing is more divine than the earth, and our being within it.

EXHIBITIONS
Many Hands Make Life Work – Deborah Kelly and the Moving Image, 2011–2021
26 November 2022 – 19 February 2023
Maitland Regional Art Gallery, New South Wales

Between the Details: Video Art from the ACMI Collection
9 December 2022 – 26 February 2023
Benalla Art Gallery, Victoria

Still Life Now 
24 September 2022 – 19 February 2023
Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane