Impending Time: Mary Kelly’s Corpus

Abstract

Corpus, the first section of Mary Kelly’s large project Interim, stirs up feelings that cannot quite be pinned down into words, images that are on the verge of being discovered and ideas that might be on the tip of a collective tongue. This sensation is due to the exhibition’s subject matter and to its visual presentation. Both are allied to the debates and experiments around women’s relation to language and images that drew feminist aesthetics into ‘alliance’ with avant-garde aesthetics during the 1970s. Mary Kelly’s work as an artist and theorist, and my own work as a film-maker and theorist, are identified with this movement; and we both gained a cultural identity and framework from its existence. But our common political origins go back further, to the early days of the Women’s Movement in 1970. It is for this reason that writing the introduction to this catalogue means more to me than the pleasure of discussing and celebrating the work of an artist I admire, and consider to have great political and poetic significance.

Written as the catalogue text for ‘Corpus’ held at the Riverside Studios, London, and at Kettle’s Yard Gallery, Cambridge, in 1986.