Mary Kelly originally trained as a painter. She studied in Florence, Italy with protégés of Giorgio Morandi where she learned traditional techniques, but her real interest was contemporary art. She relocated to London, England in 1968 to continue her postgraduate study at St. Martin’s School of Art.
Simultaneously Kelly’s art career and her involvement with the Women’s Movement began in the 1970’s in London. She was active in grassroots media organizations and was also a member of a group of politically active women, who developed intellectual feminist theories of sexuality and representation.
In 1971 Mary Kelly went to see Othon at the National Film Theater, where she saw the way directors Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub ran the whole reel on a one shot going into Rome. She knew this was what she wanted to do, not just film, but also with installation as a series of stills.
Her first experience of working on a film was the making of Nightcleaners (1970-1975), an experimental film made by the members of the Berwick Street Collective (Marc Karlin, Mary Kelly, James Scott and Humphry Trevelyan). This film is a documentary that recorded the campaign to unionize the women who worked at night cleaning office blocks and who were being victimized and underpaid.
Kelly exhibited the first of a three part series titled, “Post Partum Document” (1973-1979) at the ICA in London in 1976. This epic series explores the artist’s relationship with her infant son through the combination of text, images and found objects. The installation includes her son’s stained nappy liners, which was considered scandalous at that time by the tabloid press, but in fact was meant to challenge the Conceptual art establishment and was also pivotal to the late twentieth century feminism movement. As a result Mary Kelly became a prominent American woman artist and is among the most influential feminist artists working today.
She is known for her project-based work addressing questions of sexuality and identity in the form of large-scale narrative installations. For more than three decades Kelly has received worldwide attention on her richly textured narratives and images.
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