These works dramatise the familiar in order to create a more seductive dimension, which might cause the viewer to drift elsewhere, to a strange place where worlds collapse and intersect. Nature is depicted as transient and ephemeral within ambiguous environments that reverse or rearrange ordered thinking. Humanity is seen as suspended between aid and attack, or support and threat, while also intrinsically linked to the natural world. Paradoxical relationships between nature and culture emerge.

Inspired by the myths anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss examined in his book The Raw and the Cooked (1964), I have used animals as metaphors for human behaviour. In these Brazilian myths, the deer represents water and is diametrically opposed to the fire, hence its role smouldering fire or pumping water. However, the paintings add a contemporary dimension to these ancient myths by examining an extreme form of cooking: the combustion of fossil fuels.

Each of these works contains mediations between raw nature (oil) and cooked nature (its burning). While each painting’s subject is that of transformation (from nature to culture), the paintings are equally objects of transformation. The content of one painting may be perceived as the inverse of another. In Ground Control (2004), ancient club mosses (Lycopodiums), fern-like plants that were the basis of what constitutes much of our fossil fuel reserve today, are transformed into a consumable, Shell Oil. In Coalface (2004), coal is burnt and consumed. This system allows me to create an open narrative between works, which is ideological without being overly didactic.

I painted Choreography of War Reportage in 2003, just before the invasion of Iraq and following the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan.  The ‘desert storm’ camouflage pattern, which constitutes the ground, is taken from the military uniforms of Western soldiers in the Middle-East. The featured jet fighter aircraft is an F-16 Fighting Falcon. At the time, Noam Chomsky commented that we were only ever seeing images of planes taking off and landing, but never the death and destruction that was occurring, and this inspired the title and content of the work, Choreography of War Reportage.

The broken flock of birds, which were painted from photographs I took of turns at Rainbow Beach, QLD, were depicted as a metaphor for this absence of images of displaced people. Compelled by their aerodynamic form, their planar shapes seemed to correspond to the jet fighter, and break against the biomorphic appearance of the camouflage ground in the composition. Now that I reflect on the image, I’m struck by the perplexing incongruousness of the birds, that is as broken dismembered flock, but as individuals aiming at targets to meet their prey. Perhaps this ambiguity adds dimension to figuring the complexity of war.

Lévi-­Strauss claimed to uncover the logical functions of animals, deducing for example, that over a series of myths, deer continuously symbolised the origin of water. In my painting Sparky the Culture Hero (2003), deer function to extinguish fire. What I found most appealing was not the reduction of these myths to their essences in order to reveal a “core myth”, but that the characters function as “operators” within the context of each myth. It was through this figurative binary language, cognitively speaking, that the “translation” from these myths to the hybrid figures in my work took place.

In her catalogue essay for Primavera 2005, curator Felicity Fenner notes, ‘Ground Control (2004) is one of the most poignant paintings in Primavera 2005. Vegetation, water and oil are joined in an apocalyptic whirlpool, the inevitable result of contemporary society’s self-destructive path. The patient anthropomorphic creatures of Kelly’s other paintings have retreated, their work done. No longer able to service the world’s greed for water and fossil fuels, symbols from the Carboniferous era (the ancient club moss) have merged with those of their modern exploiters (Shell Oil) in a fatal swirl. The diagrammatic nature of this painting reminds us that the earth’s environment is subject to change—specifically in today’s content, climate change—and ultimately cyclical in nature’ (2005, p17).

Pathfinder Closing (2005) features a Nissan Pathfinder closing over a couple fleeing the foreboding structure of the four-wheel drive. In the background, a looming storm, composed through the shape of a geranium leaf, reinforces the temporal aspect of the work. Like most of my paintings, the relationship between figure and ground oscillates. Through the structure of the car you can see a finer fern structure, suggestive of the layers of fossil evidence that have provided us with knowledge of the formation of fossil fuels, in particular fossils formed during the Carboniferous period which was mostly vegetated by fern like species. References to time, fossils and everyday transport obliquely suggest that a ‘pathfinder’ may lead to a dead end.  (The figures are based on a soldier rescuing a child in Vietnam War footage).

The swallows in this painting are abstract representations of swallows I photographed that year at the Enoggera Dam/Reservoir, The Gap, where I lived. They were so small, high and flew so fast that I was challenged to capture them accurately. I was aesthetically drawn to the light falling on their bodies—their abstract forms were a gift.

Coal Face 2003 won the 2004 Churchie Exhibition of Emerging Art

Judge: Dr Rex Butler

In Coal Face figures simultaneously attack and fuel each other to reflect the irony of war.