Podcast #8 - Jess Kelly

Wait Long By The River

Jess Kelly - Sculptor/painter/all-round-maker on finding harmonies in the natural world and bringing them out through painstaking work and red wine

"With that work... I basically sat in my room and drank wine and ate chocolate and went through a lot of stanley knives."

All unintended, a theme is forming in the show: it can be very hard to pin down in, say, 140 characters just what it is an artist does. Jess Kelly is a sculptor, an engraver, a painter, an arranger of fruit, an embroiderer… she engages with everything except limits in her quest to point out how humanity reflects and embodies nature, and vice versa. On the other hand, Jess puts it thusly: "I did very little in the last few weeks except go home and embroider and move pears around."

She’s a lover of language as well as art, which made speaking with her a real treat, particularly in the construction of the secret section at the end of the show.

Jess’s current exhibition is called Still, Life and is running at Brunswick Art Space until the 31st of August… then her artwork might start turning up in unexpected locations around Footscray! We’ll all be keeping our eyes out, and if we find any, we’ll put them up on the facebook page at www.facebook.com/waitlongbytheriver