Personal Statement

Enthused to explore the potential of self-identity, Adam Kelly’s work develops notions of history and ideologies from a community perspective. Kelly develops work ranging across various mediums including sculpture and painting. His characteristically Eurocentric work reveals his successes and failures to represent nostalgic memories both devastating and promising to national and international sects.

Kelly’s compositions have an autonomous determination and often exorcising approach that links his oeuvre to modernism. The re-appraisal of avant-garde techniques such as collage with found and discarded items construct new situations to comment on farcical ideas including diaspora and nationalism.

My practice is accomplished by attempting to fulfil my own affiliation with my hybrid European identity through mediums that include painting and sculpture. I re-evaluate concepts such as cultural boundaries, homeland adoption, and citizenship naturalisation and renunciation with my work’s own successes and failures to bring about change in ourselves.

My work is composed of found, industrial, and stereotypically (Eastern) European objects. The discarded items are approached with autonomous determination, and an ‘automatic inventiveness’ so as to represent a feeling of urgency, and to demonstrate and exorcise my diaspora to my heritage through process.

With artistic influences such as Antoni Tàpies and Joseph Beuys, and influence from movements such as Arte Povera and Dada, new situations are available to me to comment on the ideas of belonging and diaspora. The resulting impoverished artwork conjures up memories of familiar objects and happenings, presenting a means to nostalgia and developing a perspective toward a promising future.