Orla Kelly

textiel , tekenen , Soft sculptures , schilderen , Autobiografisch

My practice moves between research, speculative storytelling, and material exploration. Working through drawing, moving image, sculpture, and primarily textile installations, I explore how histories of place, climate, and human intervention reverberate in the present and question dominant narratives of space and how we relate to shifting environments. ‍ My research is both archival and field-based, collecting stories, images, and fragments that trace the layered realities of lived experience. These are combined with visual references ranging from early artworks to contemporary media, creating a vocabulary that merges cultural history with the present moment. ‍ My work attempts to balance play and critique by taking images, abstracting, translating, and transforming them, and then using them to tell stories. I use color, texture, and pattern as tools to translate into visual form, developing abstract languages that give shape to forces often felt but not easily seen. Alongside my studio practice, I facilitate a variety of textile based workshops in Ireland and the Netherlands as a means of exchange and community connection.

**When the world ends only babies should float.** - Rooted in historical painting, myth and narrative, ‘When the World Ends Only Babies Should Float’ imagines a survival pod for the innocent to outlive the world as it descends into ecological chaos. Based on the so-called survival of a baby ‘Beatrix de Rijke’ during the 1421 Sint Elizabethan flood of the Biesbosch National Park, this work looks for a way to offer care to a future generation facing climate collapse. The part crib, part life-vest, part wearable home becomes a companion, the user breathes life into the pod by inflating it and in return the pod holds and cares for its user. By embodying protection in soft, creaturely form, it reflects on the strange acceptance of the climate crisis in our collective imagination, asking what survival might mean if tenderness, rather than control, were our guiding perspectives.

**Wave[s]** - Wave(s) is a video piece with an accompanying book that explores how waves have been perceived, recorded and distributed through media. The viewer moves through a waterscape that begins in tranquil serenity and quickly transforms into chaos. This watery environment was created by collecting images and videos of floods and waves and cutting only the water out of each. The landscape starts with painted waves from the 1200's-1900's, showing how waves have been documented historically, continuing through documentation of waves as leisure, and ending in chaotic documentation of catastrophic waves. Wave(s) looks at how bodies of water can quickly shift from something sublime and beautiful, to a force that can cause total ruin - questioning our use of, and respect for our environment and reinforcing the power of the natural landscape beyond human control. Sound by Nico Cimadevila.

**Bog/Soft** - An early exploration of drawing as a method of researching landscape. A canvas becoming a space where new thoughts, ideas, words, forms and paths could grow. This canvas was a fugly-beautiful early development of Bog Drawing, a methodology that formed during my MA research. The process began by looking closely at the soft land beside which I grew up, and thinking about how its characteristics, its layers, instability, accumulation, preservation, disorientation and slow transformation, might shape a different way of drawing and understanding the landscape. This 180x190cm paper became an of abstract cross-section of the scarred land. Alongside the drawing, I kept a 13-metre-long rolling notebook / archive, collecting words, thoughts, images, maps, memories, drawings and residues from the process itself. These different layers of research began to accumulate within the drawing, blending the physical landscape with its histories, stories, myths, and my own experience of the place. The work became a speculative epistemological inquiry into my relationship with the bog beside my home back in Ireland, Ballinderry & Ballynagrenia bog, and a way of thinking with the land through drawing, allowing memory, intuition, storytelling and material experience to sit alongside more conventional ways of recording and understanding space. This was the beginning of Bog Drawing, a practice that would eventually lead 8 meters down.

**Bog, Softly: The rolling archive.** - During the development of a research methodology coined Bog Drawing, I kept a 13-metre-long rolling notebook / archive, collecting words, thoughts, images, maps, memories, drawings and residues from the process itself. These different layers of research began to accumulate within the drawing practice, blending the physical landscape with its histories, stories, myths, and my own experience of place. This evolving archive included images of maps which were used in my drawings, the textile scraps where I would wipe my oil pastel covered fingers, images of artefacts found in the bog, images of the bogs beside where I grew up, poems, and a series of poems and texts about the landscape. The archive was displayed at C3-studios during a group show titles Halfway-Point.

**Slowly sinking, softly thinking.** - An eight-metre descent into a speculative bog hole, this drawing uses Bog Drawing, a methodology formed by the artist to explore Irish landscape. This drawing, made over a period of 8 months spatialises the history of an 8000 year old bog hole, every centimeter representing 100 years of history layering and preserving through partially decomposing matter. Layers of darkness, disorientation, myth, growth, accumulation, and preservation create an imagined landscape beneath the familiar surface, inviting you in to get lost in its surface. Besides the drawing hangs 4 textile artifacts, influenced by forms created in the drawing practice. These textiles are activated through the body, transforming into wearable bog creatures, further bringing you inside the landscape.

**[Our] Spills.** - For five years I have photographed everything I have accidentally spilled, not because any individual spill seemed significant, but because significance began to emerge through repetition. This has resulted in a collection, a digital archive of over 500 spills. I was invited to play with this archive at OMI, a space for art, design and architecture in Rotterdam. I created a system for mapping spills, to assign new meaning to something usually seen as meaningless. The event became a participatory spilling ground, resulting in a 9 meter spilling archive, and highlighting the value of things primarily seen as accidents, or mistakes.

**Felting Home: Textile explorations of Rotterdam** - Felting Home is an ongoing project in collaboration with my Mam. Workshop development and facilitation is a large part of my practice, with collective learning forming a basis for my research. This project asks people to consider the non-material elements that build what can be considered home, such as memory, stories or people, and turn them into material through the process of wet felting. All the objects are then collected as part of a new archive of home. We have been able to bring this workshop Ireland with support from Creative Ireland and to Rotterdam with support from CBK Rotterdam, hosted at Garage, Rotterdam.

**Things that emerge from eight meters below the surface.** - Textile forms emerged directly from my research method of Bog drawing. Existing as both two-dimensional textile hangings and three-dimensional wearable forms, they shift between object, sculpture, and body. Presented alongside drawing, they were previously activated through the body, becoming faceless, shifting characters. Each piece transforms differently when worn, with varied hanging mechanisms allowing multiple configurations. Together the forms explore transformation, aliveness, and the unexpected qualities of the landscape.

**Bacon & Eggs** - 'Bacon and Eggs' is a story of a repeated morning ritual shared between two lovers. Their affection, but also dependency highlighted by the small acts and habits they share. Domestic symbols from around the kitchen come in pairs to reinforce the role of the couple. Representing the relationship between my parents, and worn by them, the project consists of two large tufted garments. The egg garment wears a tufted salt and pepper hat, and the bacon wears a tufted knife and fork hat. Funded by the Arts Council Agility award & Making and Momentum Young Artist Prize.

**‘I’ll be at yours in 5 xxx’** - Collaboration with London Based Fashion Designer/Artist, Adam Farrell. Me and Adam were lucky to live a 5 minute walk from each other during the pandemic. We became each other’s place of comfort and cosiness during a time of stress and unknowns. This time made me see the value of living nearby a friend as an adult. Having wine late at night, ordering pizzas, going to Tesco for treats, drinking tea, watching Sex and the City and never actually watching it but talking over it. The warmth of reliability, consistency, and dependency. But then Adam moved and a little tiny void was created. Before he left we wanted to pay homage to the time we had spent in Phibsborough, living so close to each other, so in our vanity we made an outfit dedicated to us, with our faces plastered across it and our hands reaching out to one another.

**'PUSH' from 'As much as I wouldn't like to'** - ‘As much as I wouldn’t like to’ was born from a childhood memory of my parents covering my eyes during explicit scenes in movies. This started a period of research into the normalisation, and sexualisation of violence against women in media and pop culture where the dominant, aggressive male is romanticised, and male sexual desire is prioritised ?????? This project consists of paintings, drawings, and soft sculptures that focus on unwanted interactions that come from a place of unjust entitlement and desire. Interactions that embody starkly opposing emotions. The work is deceptively playful, and the figures are direct depictions of moments of unwelcome touch. These moments lure the viewer, using colours and textures that seduce and tempt whilst simultaneously contradicting their appearance with the narrative they create.

**'SQUEEZE' from 'As much as I wouldn't like to'** - ‘As much as I wouldn’t like to’ was born from a childhood memory of my parents covering my eyes during explicit scenes in movies. This started a period of research into the normalisation, and sexualisation of violence against women in media and pop culture where the dominant, aggressive male is romanticised, and male sexual desire is prioritised. This project consists of paintings, drawings, and soft sculptures that focus on unwanted interactions that come from a place of unjust entitlement and desire. Interactions that embody starkly opposing emotions. The work is deceptively playful, and the figures are direct depictions of moments of unwelcome touch. These moments lure the viewer, using colours and textures that seduce and tempt whilst simultaneously contradicting their appearance with the narrative they create. Shortlisted for the RDS Visual Arts Awards.

**'Reach'** - ‘As much as I wouldn’t like to’ was born from a childhood memory of my parents covering my eyes during explicit scenes in movies. This started a period of research into the normalisation, and sexualisation of violence against women in media and pop culture where the dominant, aggressive male is romanticised, and male sexual desire is prioritised. This project consists of paintings, drawings, and soft sculptures that focus on unwanted interactions that come from a place of unjust entitlement and desire. Interactions that embody starkly opposing emotions. The work is deceptively playful, and the figures are direct depictions of moments of unwelcome touch. These moments lure the viewer, using colours and textures that seduce and tempt whilst simultaneously contradicting their appearance with the narrative they create.

Datum: 30-01-2024 t/m 28-05-2024

Bacon and Eggs

Datum: 30-01-2023 t/m 09-02-2023

In samenwerking met: Irish Arts Council funding, Making & momentum young artist grant

'Bacon and Eggs' tells a story of a repeated morning ritual shared between two lovers. Their affection, but also dependency highlighted by the small acts and habits they share. Domestic symbols from around the kitchen come in pairs to reinforce the role of the couple. Representing the relationship between my parents, and worn by them, the project consists of two large tufted garments. The egg garment wears a tufted salt and pepper hat, and the bacon wears a tufted knife and fork hat.

https://www.orla-kelly.com/breakfast

Repair Workshops

Datum: 24-08-2022 t/m 19-11-2024

Locatie: Ireland

In samenwerking met: Primark

Since March I have been teaching clothing and textile repair workshops. Often traveling back to Ireland to teach these classes for a sustainability initiative for Primark called 'Primark Cares'. These are really nice moments to share my love for slow fashion and textiles and getting to meet and reach a really wide audience and share conversation about textiles and clothing.

https://www.orla-kelly.com

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