Áine Kelly
Áine Kelly is an Irish visual artist based in Bristol, UK. Her practice is multi-disciplinary, specialising mainly in photography, sculpture and textiles. She graduated with a BA in Fine Art at the Crawford College of Art and Design in 2016.
Previous works examine the sculptural potential and material essence of photography, temporality and environmental concerns. Currently, her practice aims to minimise her environmental impact by working with natural and repurposed materials within sculptural and textile processes.
She has received numerous awards and grants to support her practice and has exhibited internationally.
Works
Flow + Flow
This work was made whilst on an artist residency in Iceland. Lumps, sheets and crystals of ice were placed onto light sensitive paper and processed in the darkroom. Magnifying lenses were often used to control and refract the light passing through various states of ice and water, resulting in burn like marks. This manipulation of light was also a way to accelerate the melting of ice by hand. The intention of the work is to present an abstract impression of the landscape and capture the transient nature of ice, alluding to the country’s retreating glaciers.
Spatial Compositions
This work explores the playful dialogue between sculpture and photography. The process begins with simple flat materials, which are manipulated into spatial objects by folding, cutting and sewing. They are captured using a photographic scanner which in turn becomes a digital echo of the photogram process. Further manipulation of the scans are done in post processing, involving compositing, layering and removing evidence of thread which aids some of the sculptures forms. This creates impossible structures that appear to suspend in space and depicts elements of real and unreal simultaneously. There is a cyclic journey from flat materials into spatial objects and back into the flat plane of the photographic image.
DE/CONSTRUCT
This work came about from experimenting with the chemigram process. Burning, wetting and scratching into photographic paper prior to it’s processing was done in an attempt to break down the photograph. This resulted in abstract forms and textures of an other worldly aesthetic. The prints were scanned digitally to enlarge minuscule details of the print.
As this work is a result of a reaction between destructive processes and chemicals of light sensitive paper, it is not a record of light. This brings to question what defines a photograph.