What's on

Mises en Scene by Anthony Noel Kelly

ANTHONY-NOEL KELLY – Work to date

Kelly is an artist who works using a range of media to represent organic matter in its many guises during the cycle of life.  The inter-relationships in his work - whether photographic, sculptural or painted - reveal an ongoing concern with natural as opposed to idealised form, which is to be seen as a thread running through much of his work.

Kelly’s methodical composition of moments of natural mutability, caught in more permanent form by the cast, camera, the paintbrush, taxidermy or his elaborate mises en scènes, are presented to the viewer in carefully ordered patterns.  To date, versimilitude has been significant in his work, using traditional methods to represent principally organic matter.  Previous work includes the monumental photographic series Birthdays, recording the life-span of the male and female body. In the work an 80 year life-span is represented as photographs of naked members of each sex aged accordingly (160 in total) taken on any day of that year. The body is represented in its most ‘natural’ state, free from any artific and photographed in daylight.

It is in his methods of display that he perhaps best reflects the traditional notion of man’s effort to bring nature within his comprehension and his control.  For Kelly, versimilitude is also important as a faithful reproducion not just of the form he observes but also its inherent energy.  The use of fragmentation and composition mark the artist’s personal comment within his finished pieces. 

His series of taxidermied birds and fish - also presented dissected, in pairs of male and female, or in groups - also explore the laws of nature and their close relationship to mankind.  In much of his work the opportunity to view nature at such close proximity remains uncannily surreal and, ironically, unnatural.

Presented in different combinations of elements, his series of work explore the laws of nature and their relationship to mankind, reaffirming the affinities shared by all living creatures.  The resulting mises en scène reflect man’s social behaviour and situation and the nature of mutual dependence and interaction.  By the interventions and the resulting shared experiences, the artist alludes to the compatibility and intimacies in nature despite its diversities as well as the perception of personal identity within the inevitable cycle of living and dying.