Jane Kelly
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Jane Kelly (born London 1956) artist and journalist, affiliated with the Stuckists art group since 2000.
Jane Kelly was a writer on the Daily Mail, but was dismissed in 2004 after a painting by her If We Could Undo Psychosis 2 featuring Myra Hindley was exhibited in The Stuckists Punk Victorian during the Liverpool Biennial. The painting shows a family group of mother and two children with child-killer Myra Hindley substituted for the father and holding a teddy bear. The incident was reported on the front page of The Guardian newspaper, who commented:
- "Stuckism, the art movement founded by Tracey Emin's former boyfriend to oppose the pretensions of Britart, claims to advocate 'honest, uncensored expression'. Unfortunately, the Daily Mail does not appear to share those values".
It described how the paper welcomed a previous work exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Show by Kelly showing London Mayor Ken Livingstone in the context of the 1944 Stauffenberg plot against Hitler. The Daily Mail's managing editor, Lawrence Sear, who dismissed Kelly, described as "absolute rubbish" the claim that the loss of her job was related to her artwork.[1]
She has said that she was never given a full reason for her dismissal, but that she had previously also got into trouble by trying to introduce the term "German expressionism" into some copy about the performing dwarves used in the MGM film, The Wizard of Oz, some of whom came from Weimar Germany. She said that the acting feature editor at the time had never heard of such a thing and told her "what the fuck is German Expressionism? I have never heard of it and neither have our fucking readers."[2]
Kelly's work is mainly preoccupied with The Holocaust and she sees herself as a "post-holocaust painter". She has recently visited Zandefort, the beach 15 minutes from Amsterdam, where Anne Frank used to go regularly as a child accompanied by her family. Kelly has made a painting based on this visit which was auctioned by Sothebys in Belfast on April 28, 2006, in aid of victims of trauma. The painting was sold for £1,500 to an Irish collector. Kelly said, "It was rather a lonely job going out to Zandefort to make the drawings for the painting and sometimes I doubted my sanity in doing it at all."
She studied History and Fine Art at the University of Stirling, and also at the Central School of Speech and Drama. Her work has been shown at the Royal Academy Summer Show, the Sackville Gallery, London, the Excel Centre, Manchester, the MacRobert Arts Centre, Stirling and the Wolverhampton City Art Gallery.
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[edit] Notes and references
- ^ Wells, Matt and Cozens, Claire (2004)"Daily Mail sacks writer who painted Hindley picture" The Guardian. Accessed online April 24, 2006
- ^ "Jane Kelly" stuckism.com. Accessed April 24, 2006
