“I was brought up in a family that was quite religious. I was sent to a religious school, so it was quite a big part of my life, and it was something I felt ambivalent about but also at the same time very conscious of. So I wanted to explore that: the spiritual located in the ordinary.”
Driven by the twin desires of reinventing herself and responding to specific sites for her work, she moved from performance based work in the early part of her career to installation and object based work in the latter. Thrilling examples from every phase of her diverse body of work can be found at Modern Art Oxford in this, the first posthumous retrospective of Finn-Kelcey’s artistic practice.
At the Gallery entrance is an immediate instance of Finn-Kelcey’s ability to wryly play with the material and the beyond. God Kennel – A Tabernacle makes us look to the heavens by placing a dog’s kennel on the ceiling. This is to play with the reversibility of dog and God in order to question our perceptions of heaven and earth through the inversion and elevation of the lowly.
Our perceptions of God are further explored in Visual Questionnaire, a project undertaken with ordinands in 1996, while a Sargent Fellow at the British School in Rome. She asked Roman Catholic ordinands to provide visual responses to the questions ‘Where does God live?’ and ‘What does God look like?’ 40 sheets of responses are displayed along one long wall with the mix of simple abstract and complex figurative imagery running along a continuum from traditional religious to secular iconography; all serving to demonstrate the impossibility of visualising the infinite. Several of the ordinands found the exercise impossible to contemplate visually and therefore resorted to words instead of images.
Sally O'Reilly wrote of Finn-Kelcey’s Angel, an installation on the exterior of St Paul’s Bow Common (2004), that she seemed to be emphasising the “difficulty of finding the eloquence to voice the unvoicable, the absurdity of evoking the spiritual from the material.” Yet, as Guy Brett has written, Angel, and other of Finn-Kelcey’s religiously themed works, combine irreverence and genuine spiritual longing in order to both debunk and venerate. Her work is therefore mischievous, challenging, ironic and truthful.
In 1999 she contributed an outdoors sculpture for the Millennium Dome’s public walkways. Four customized vending machines (one of which features in this exhibition) dispensed non-denominational prayers with the prayers being animated on illuminated LED display boards, each named after a popular chocolate bar. Finn-Kelcey explained how It Pays to Pray worked:
"Insert 20p and view your prayer. Press 6 for FLYTE and the animated text goes into action: I Need to be Brave, I Want to be Brave, I don't feel Brave, I feel Scared, Scared to Death. Or press 2 for Ripple: I am so Happy, So Very Very Happy, So Happy to be me, Thank you. I am so Happy; Happy, Happy, Happy, So very Happy just to be me. Then press the return button and get your 20p back."
It Pays to Pray dispenses with the priest as intermediary, a critique both of organised religion and of consumerism, while connecting with the reality that, just as we go to a chocolate vending machine when our blood sugar levels are low, we pray when our spiritual levels are low. Finn-Kelcey also demonstrated this reality through a questionnaire compiled for the catalogue of The British Art Show 4 in which she asked artists and critics, ‘Do you pray? If so to whom and for what?’ thereby discovering that some did, primarily when in need. Finn-Kelcey answered her own question by saying she prayed “To God – ‘Thy will be done’ – but please let me know what it is.”
As this retrospective amply demonstrates, Finn-Kelcey combined avant-garde experimentation with socio-political aims and the exploration of life, belief and beyond. She worked in the belief that, by choosing new mediums and making specific things for specific places, she could continue to reinvent herself and remain a perennial beginner. As Guy Brett has noted this means that no “two works of hers are physically alike; each represents a fresh challenge.” Each is essentially a resurrection or rebirth; an approach to life and art from which a Church needing to re-present the Gospel afresh in each generation could potentially learn.
Rose Finn-Kelcey: Life, Belief and Beyond, Modern Art Oxford, until 15 October 2017 - www.modernartoxford.org.uk/
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Jimi Hendrix - Angel.
