🔸🔹🔸UPCOMING EXHIBITION: ARTISTS IN THE ARCHIVES🔸🔹🔸

Opening reception and book launch: Friday, September 2, 2022, 5-7PM

Exhibition Running from: Friday, September 2, 2022-January 7, 2023

Venue: The Henry Sheldon Museum of Vermont History in Middlebury, Vermont, USA, VT 05753

I am delighted to have been asked to participate in this fascinating project by curator, collage artist and publisher Ric Kasini Kadour.

It was great to gain access to the Archives at The Henry Sheldon Museum, Vermont, to search their images and to be tasked with creating works that responded to the topic of community care. This peice created for the exhibition is titled “Close Knit” and refers to Vermont’s rich history of sheep hearding, textiles, industry and trade as community care, as well as referencing the tradition of the American Patchwork Quilt as form of biographical and historical document.

Read my statement here:

“Textiles are deeply interwoven with community care practices in rural communities across the world. The farming of Sheep and other animals for their wools provide livelihoods for families, goods for transport and trade, in the past these trade routes fostered community connections and information sharing amongst towns and settlements within the regions that they existed, in this way opportunities arose for neighbours to interact and come to know one another.

On the more interpersonal level, individuals with particular skills in textiles and the fibre arts can weave and knit together clothing and household items like blankets, rugs and quilts. These are practical offerings of comfort, warmth and care to friends and family members.

Alongside the creation of physical items, there is the deep social good which exists in the sharing of traditional skills. Individuals who gather together in knitting circles or other forms of crafting workshop experience the privilege of working and creating with one another, knitting their communities more closely together.

The creation of patchwork quilts in particular have become a tradition which represents stability, community care, and have even served as a unique form of historical documentation, with carefully crafted panels carrying visual information about personal, familial and community stories and events down through generations.”

This project has resulted in the exhibition, the production of a folio of prints, and the publication of a book.

The folio of prints is an edition of five plus one artist proof. One folio will be housed in the Henry Sheldon Museum’s permanent collection, a second will become part of the Kolaj Institutes permanent collection. The other editions are available for touring and/or sale contact: info@kolajmagazine.com

For more on this specific project please visit here.

To purchase the book visit here.

Or for more from The Henry Sheldon Museum visit here.

"A Monument to Dreaming Together" (2021) - Digital Collage - Anthony D Kelly

My piece in response to the “Empty Columns Are a Place to Dream" project in Birr, Co. Offaly, Ireland, as part of the Birr Vintage Week & Arts Festival.

See my statement below:

“Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.” - James Baldwin

To dream is to embark on a ubiquitous and mystical human experience. We each engage in nightly expeditions into the vast wildness of our own inner expanse, embarking on nocturnal journeys through the uncharted hinterlands of the self. Contact with this emergent space often churns forth inspirational ideas, creative insights and integrative experiences, possessed of a form of deep intelligence that is unfamiliar in our waking lives. Recent sleep research has even implicated dreaming as an integral element in the mind’s inherent capacity to process and heal from traumatic events.

Dreaming is also synonymous with the ability to look beyond, and to envision new and better futures, both personal and collective. Indeed the simple statement of “I have a dream…” evokes the powerful words of Martin Luther King Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, his speech itself an act of collective dreaming that opened new pathways for discourse and lived possibilities. Also in listening to the history of Birr, there is much evidence of the town as a powerful site for collective dreaming. For example, the famous Leviathan of Parsonstown; a literal device constructed for the purpose of seeing far beyond our own world, and peering into the unknown heavens. And the Cáin Adomnáin or Law of The Innocents that came about as a result of the Synod of Birr in 697AD. This agreement was a prototype for the Geneva Convention and the first such accord to protect innocents during wartime, envisioning and enacting a better future.

Our world today is one of many crises. Humanity is struggling, as a people we are deeply troubled, fractured, isolated, grief stricken and traumatised. This is why now, possibly more than ever, we need new sites and spaces to gather, heal and relearn the ancient art of dreaming together.

All works from this outstanding project will be published in a book from Kolaj Magazine to mark the exhibition this can be preordered here.