MNEMOSYNE, EARTH DRILL, HAZELHURST ARTS CENTRE 2023
Madeleine Kelly is an Australian painter living and working from Woolongong Australia.
Madeleine Kelly, Painter, Artist,
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MNEMOSYNE, EARTH DRILL, HAZELHURST ARTS CENTRE 2023

Works exhibited in In the arms of unconsciousness: Women, Feminism and the Surreal, Hazelhurst Arts Centre (1 July – 27 August, 2023) curated by Carrie Kibbler.
‘Mnemosyne’ 2018 – 2023 oil on polyester, 101 x 137 cm

‘Mnemosyne’ carries all the weight of our collective unconscious embedded in our desire to find/understand the shape of things. Spirals have a double movement that opens outward or draws back, a twofold rhythm of liveliness and creation, and withdrawal and entropy. This inward outward motion is a pattern recording the material life of time. The figure in the background is appropriated from ‘Burial of the Wood’ by Piero della Francesca.

Earth drill 2023 oil on polyester, 137 x 101 cm

In ‘Earth drill’, Chthonic birds float around this Wollongong earth drill’s spiral. Their elongated tongues extend to pollinate flowers or interpenetrate eyes, suggesting symbiotic exchange and networks akin to neural synapses of the brain, where branched forms metaphorically float around in watery heads transmitting meaning. The painting might be considered an oily network of memory, the brain inside out, where geometric ‘treelets’ interact with biomorphic forms . A mould for industrial manufacturing doubles as the sun while other moulds spin out in the underworld.