June has come around quickly and on the 25th I will travel to Bergen to catch up with artist friends and attend a performance festival an hour up the coast. From July 1st- September 30th I will be in residence at The Nordic Artists’ Centre Dale with a project that further explores collaboration models and processes. https://nkdale.no/selected-artists-for-2026/
For over 20 years my practice has engaged with dissolving the perimeters of conventional collaboration. Expanding from the usual co-operative model, I have co-developed models with artist Richard Hancock that are based either in notions of solo endeavours or as contagion through viral models .https://www.hancockandkelly.com/
A collaboration between: Traci Kelly *1961 (Daughter) & William Matthew Kelly *1940 † 2022 (Father).
The collaboration across the life/death divide will take place between myself and my father. The treatment of my performance work is influenced by the way Caravaggio carves bodies out of light through chiaroscuro. Recent video works evolve at the pace of painting and capture the application and spread of paint-like materials such as iodine and black tea. My father, a keen fisherman would make his own fishing floats, turning them carefully as he laid down precise bands of enamel paint. We have each come to painting in our own individual way. The residency at Dale allows us to consider what shape painting takes for us as shared project in a setting that would be one of our few mutual meeting points— the love of nature. The collaboration is not a mystical proposition of conjuring or channeling, but a concrete process-based enquiry based in painting and will push at what painting can be across form and content. It will also consider what painting can do, acting as a catalyst to approach individual and societal concerns around life, death, residue and value.
One of Dad’s lead fishing weights © Traci Kelly 2026
