LYING WOMEN

'LYING WOMEN' is an animated collage, made of images Kelly has cut from discarded art history books. She has collated hundreds of printed paintings of the recurring reclining female nudes that represent high culture and its pinnacle moments in western art.

The original paintings depict inviting, receptive images of feminine sexual passivity, as idealised by male artists across five centuries. In gathering multiple reproductions of the same artworks from many publications, the differing colour tones, print and paper qualities of the same paintings amusingly undo the authority of the original. Kelly's stop-motion animation suggests other lives for these figures as they move and gather across the screen, one in which they perhaps have more agency over their bodies, desires and representation. Manet's famous and at the time controversially 'real' 'Olympia' 1863 has a starring role. As she both asserts her presence and yet flies off the screen we can now chuckle at the thought that the artists may have felt their paintings gave them power over the bodies they depicted.