Fiona Kelly is drawn to the metamorphosis of territory, both urban and rural, in an age of environmental crisis. She examines questions surrounding the human ‘exploration’ of landscape, understood as both a relationship with nature and an extractivist approach to natural resources. Specifically, her research into wasteland and abandoned spaces addresses themes of ecology and society.
De Certeau’s adage “stories about places are makeshift things, they are composed of the world’s debris” is a epitome of the individual practice of Fiona Kelly. The idea of this world’s debris manifests in the guise of material arrangements, foraged remnants, by-products of the urban landscape, which incorporate plywood, reconstituted waste and demolition material, crushed glass, dust, bitumen and scaffold like structures. These arrangements narrate a restlessness of ceaselessly shifting surfaces, resources, histories and topographies.
The idea of entropy; the gradual decline into disorder and the degradation of matter, is depicted throughout Kelly’s work. Both real and imagined interruptions or disturbances within the landscape are recorded, to visually narrate what can be considered modern fables that represent the humanistic failure to control the environment; we turn complex ecological systems into natural resources and mountains become overburden.
