Excerpts from HAVEN, Kelly Duffield, published to accompany the exhibition Haven: Kelly Duffield, 2020, organized by Naropa University, Boulder, CO. Full text available here.
FORWARD
I first came across Duffield's work as a recommendation by a friend to visit her website. Floating children with flower-heads, normal environments with couches and lawns that are filled with uncharacteristic objects, and relationships to scale that are unworldly, but some how fit the scene – all of this and more engaged my memories of being a child bursting with imagination.
House, home and family are interpreted as having mysterious powers … yet there is a sublime interaction between the characters that makes everything seem ordinary. My impression of these environments with children standing on houses and objects flying around their butterfly heads, is that Kelly has created “today’s nuclear family”. Her whimsical collages push the boundaries of perception of what is considered as a typical household.
I am so honored that Kelly agreed to exhibit her body of work at Naropa University Art Galleries. Her skill and technique is exquisite as she creates a mosaic of rooms for us to view and step into. Dream state or reality – that is for us as individuals to decide.
-Charmain Schuh is the director of Naropa University Galleries and the director, as well as an instructor, of Visual Arts at Naropa University, Boulder, CO.
PINK
It's the gleaming "linoleum pink" I find so powerful as background in Duffield's collages and paintings. Her vast, flat backdrops emphasize her meticulously surreal (and witty) renderings of hearth and heart. There are other flat, or nearly flat, limitless surroundings in her work, almost as strong – greys, sage greens, foggy blues. But her sublime pink, for me, highlights the sovereignty Duffield wonderfully expresses with her figures floating above domestic environs. These works seem to be musings on escape, fantasies of flight, yet most of her "characters" are ultimately tied to home and the routines of the ordinary. …
A woman hovers above a kitchen island (this time against a brick-wall backdrop), performing what swimmers call a "dead man's float" over a cluster of giraffe heads, her face donning a giraffe mask. Rabbits, turtles, dogs, dragonflies, sea creatures, balloons, bears, pigs, toys populate these terrains. Butterflies lift chairs, furniture levitates, as if wandering the cosmos, seeking a place to settle. Or maybe they're simply exiting, dissolving the clutter that defines our lives.
And children. Detached children reminiscent of, say, a 14th-century Giotto painting, where cherubs flutter over the Earth, apparently helpless to transform the tragedies below. But Duffield's children, her "cherubs," have agency. Headless, often suspended, there's nevertheless nothing helpless about them. They sprout flowers from their empty shoulders, they rise from chimneys, they transcend.
-Jennifer Heath is an independent scholar, art curator, award-winning activist and cultural journalist, founder-director of baksun books & arts, and the author or editor of twelve books of fiction and non-fiction.
JUST WHAT IS IT?
The “Untitled” mixed media collages depict domestic settings in a most peculiar world. To describe these spaces is to enter the realm of fantasy. Set on a shallow stage against subtly painted backgrounds, figures, furniture and objects are collaged from the world of commercial magazines, or appropriated and painted, in a style that is realistic, precise and detailed. Backgrounds, though uniformly flat, are deceptively beautiful, created with transparent layers in soft even tones, subtly receding in austere spaces. Did I mention the people often have flowers where their heads should be, or more likely, not where their heads should be? Gravity is selective in this household. “Heads” float, people too. Things, and animals, and some bodies experience weight. Sometimes a dog looks on as silent witness. Real string is glued to the paper and can tether flower-heads or butterflies to bodies. Thank goodness: it is as if things are held together by a string.
What kind of family is this? They are clean, contemporary and sophisticated, as one might expect from a household sourced from Scandinavian design magazines. Space is stepped back in shallow overlapping planes. Things are presented frontally and in profile on nearly square spaces. The square frame, like a solid house, supports the family stage. One can exit, through levitation. Within these controlled worlds, there are no faces to convey emotion, so images resist easy narrative, even while asking for interpretation. Scenes confront the viewer, working in a less cinematic way (where one might readily imagine what happened before and after), and more photographically (like a conjured memory). The collaged elements emphasize detachment, even as the oddness of this strange land offers a uniquely personal perception.
Where does this language come from? The works present like language, built of discrete parts. I am reminded of a rebus, where one struggles to decipher the mixed languages. Can Child + Dog + Couch = home sweet home (see fig. a)? The genealogy of this visual vocabulary finds modernist beginnings in Surrealism (dreams) and Dada art (nonsense). Duffield’s collages might also ask, as Richard Hamilton’s seminal Pop art collage does in its title, Just what is it that Makes Today’s Homes so Different, so Appealing? (1956, Tate, London) Those artists however, dealt with different issues. Duffield references today’s woman and the struggles of contemporary family life. The artist illustrates her story, but we must puzzle it out. There is no clear story line, so as we read what is happening, the story becomes our own. …
Same Same I, 2019 (cat. 2) is the large acryla gouache and colored pencil version of Untitled V, 2019 (fig. a). At 42 x 40 inches, it is an ambitious amplification of scale, as well as a transformation of medium (i.e. there is no collage). The artist meticulously scales up her work with the precision of a miniaturist. You are witnessing gifts of time and patience. The fierce focus required is where the artist goes to crystallize whatever this is. The Same Same title again offers no interpretive clues, but it does remind us that small is not the same as large. Hanging large on a wall, the scene is less precious, more bold, but equally intense, Same Same. Large, the family dramas become part of our personal and physical space. I welcome these reminders that life is not predictable. The tension between what can and cannot be controlled is central to every family drama, especially when kids are at play. Duffield’s works remind us that we live in Dada times, where making sense and following rules must be reconsidered. Be prepared to lose your head.
-Janice McCullagh is an art historian and artist. Retired after 30+ years of university teaching at Baylor University and University of Nebraska, she currently lives and works in Boulder, Colorado. She has many published articles on modern art, primarily on German Expressionism, her specialty. Her most recent publication is The Look Homeward, Angel Illustrations of Lew Tilley (2019).
COLLAGE AND THE KALEIDOSCOPE
Nosing around her studio, I am enmeshed in an unfolding psychological thriller mastered by this painter who when we first met was assembling visual cuts from magazines and books, these excerpts from domestic life. Duffield has assimilated profound lessons from collage, leading her to figure out ways to harness control and look inwards, allowing painting to guide her in the refracting of elements: children, plants, furniture, housewares. This move from meditating on the home and the interplay of mother, child, children, spouse, to tearing at the seams of homelife to release the tension and anguish defining this story of motherhood is the work I think is underway.
An optimistic palette suggests good taste. At a glance the picture is harmonious. A longer look and you are pushed off balance. A reliance on a flat surface built of a singular color asserts a baseline feeling. I infer struggle in each color. The perfection, the balance, the subtlety that is declared through muted pink or robin’s egg blue is set off with mustard yellows and gold or verdant greens and royal blue, orange at either end. The consistent arrangement of color blocks is the set in this theatre with its ensemble cast—alerting me: she is teasing out an interplay of forces, inanimate and animate. These swathes of base or background color are strangely dominant. What would it be to strip each painting to a singular color: removing every figure, flower, exaggerated tool, textile pattern, piece of Danish modern furniture? Would just a field of color, from the palette Kelly argues for, render me distraught, amused, disoriented, angry as her current works do? The figures and forms, are they a distraction?
These psychological portraits remind me of the blurring that happens between mother-figure and those being tended to. Her grappling with the difficulty of maintaining poise, excellence, competence becomes pronounced when the canvas grows, when the base color assumes more of my time and attention. The scaling up Untitled V, 2019 (fig. a) a modest 12” x 11” collage that seems to now function as a study, comes into full form as Same Same I (cat. 2), a 42”x40” acryla gouache canvas. She is now destabilizing this picture. The larger rendition of this composition, as a painting, moves far beyond figures and color arranged to communicate what she observes. A pert terrier has jumped up on a two-seat sofa and is ready to leap, calling to a headless girl, held in air standing on a wooden swing, she is faceless. Ropes holding the swing seat, perhaps attach to a branch. That isn’t in the picture. The girl’s head is a flower connected to her body, also by rope. Looking at the collage and then the painting, noting what can be arrived at when Kelly assumes space, paints larger, and commands color, her work is gaining courage. When Kelly assumes total control over color, shucking collage, we are invited to feel not simply look. We confront the noose.
The paintings over three years have shifted past observational mind maps, into psychological portraits, perhaps of the artist. As if reconciling her accounts, she posits well-dressed idealized child figures on the top of houses, tables, a chesterfield, often indoors, and usually with feet planted, always, perversely, there is an uncanny feeling of suspension. What when we first met were whimsical arrangements of objects and headless figures that spoke to a mayhem played by five kids, has morphed. The paintings are moving beyond a very sound symbology of birth and rebirth, hierarchy and dependences, to a reckoning—an almost dystopian looking upon the angst underpinning a stylized affluent suburban life.
-Yasmeen Siddiqui is the founding director of Minerva Projects, an independent art press whose objective is to cultivate writing about the visual arts through an interdisciplinary and literary lens. In tandem with this work, Siddiqui lectures, writes, and edits; having her work published in artist and exhibition catalogues, as well as on Hyperallergic, and in ART PAPERS, Cairo Times, Medina Magazine, Flash Art, Modern Painters, NKA, and The Brooklyn Rail.