LONDON.- Pippy Houldsworth Gallery is presenting pioneering conceptual artist Mary Kelly’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery, We don’t want to set the world on fire, which explores the role of protest in her work and its power to effect change. In the face of the current political landscape and the rise in authoritarian populism in Europe as well as the US, Kelly continues to analyse the past’s impact in shaping our understanding of the present. The title of the exhibition refers to Kelly’s 2019 site-specific project, Peace is the Only Shelter, a tribute to Women Strike for Peace, an activist group founded in 1961 to mobilise women against nuclear weapons testing. Their innovative slogans, including We don’t want to set the world on fire, were reenacted by Kelly in the desert region near the test sites where former protests took place.
The exhibition opens with the first European presentation of World on Fire Timeline (2020), representing a coda to three decades of Kelly’s work exploring global conflict and its connection with personal experience. The central narrative – beginning with the arms race in 1949, through to civil rights and anti-war protests in the aftermath of 1968, and ending with the climate crisis in the present – is interspersed with generation-defining events from Kelly’s life, such as the births of her son and her grandson. The work registers the effect of protest on the hypothetical midnight of the Doomsday Clock. Despite traversing 71 years, the timeline is non-linear; remixed and recycled elements serve to emphasise the reappearance of the past in our present moment. The assembled fragments within the Timeline reflect Kelly’s interests and the themes she has developed in the last twenty years of her project-based work, including extracts from News from Home (2017), 7 Days (2012-2016), and the Circa Trilogy (2004-2017).
Formally, Timeline marks the first time that Kelly has combined collage with her signature compressed lint medium. A technique inaugurated by the artist in 1999, it offers a compelling means of representing the ways in which the traumatic residue of historical events is filtered through the everyday. Kelly’s reworking of archival texts and images is intensely involved with both material process and duration. Individual units of compressed lint are cast in the filter screen of a domestic dryer over several months and hundreds of washing cycles, then assembled as large panels of low relief. For the artist, repetition is a performative act of remembering and potentially working through the personal and political meanings of those events.
Presented alongside Timeline are examples from the three bodies of work it references. Circa 2011 (2016) is a major work in compressed lint and the final part of Kelly’s Circa trilogy, which explores the documentation of events in Western history via mediated imagery. It draws on the prolific, and often anonymous, internet images of the Arab Spring pro-democracy demonstrations, specifically in Tahrir Square in Cairo before the military takeover in 2011. Revealing an aesthetic shift from the curated images that shape our recollection of 20th century events, the work explores the advent of ‘citizen journalism’: vast networks of photographs taken with mobile phones that proliferate across the internet. Light noise projected onto the lint recalls the glare of a computer screen. Like memory, the image often slips into illegibility, highlighting and obscuring the inaccessible zones of the past. And, true to the trilogy’s title, the combination of lint and noise suggests imprecision, blurring, and an inescapable ambiguity.
In her work, Kelly asks what defines an era, and for whom, not only as political discourse, but also as trace or residue of the personal lives that were defined by it. News from Home comprises three letters from Kelly’s archive, dating from her time living in London in the 1970s. Two examples from the series are on view: London 1974 gives a fleeting glimpse of communal living – women negotiating their commitment to activism with childcare, illness, accidents and domesticity – while Tucson 1972 addresses economic survival, alternative ways of living and political protest in the context of an escalating war in Vietnam. Likewise, two intimately scaled works, the covers of Life, April 1945 (2014), documenting the aftermath of the atomic bomb, and Shrew, December, 1970 (2017), connecting global conflict and feminist action, are subjects that still resonate today.
Mary Kelly (b. 1941, Fort Dodge, Iowa) lives and works in Los Angeles. Regarded as one of the preeminent figures in feminist art, Kelly has also had a profound impact on postmodernism and cultural politics in her writing and teaching. Her path-making practice has influenced generations of artists and remains as vital today as at any time in her five-decade long career.
In 2024, she premiered Lacunae (2023), the first section of a new, six-part body of work entitled Addendum (2023) in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, New York, NY; it has since been acquired by the museum. Earlier this year the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN acquired the second part of Addendum, Calculus (2024).
Last year, Bloomsbury published Mary Kelly's Concentric Pedagogy: Selected Writings, edited by Juli Carson. Her work recently featured in Ideas Into Action: 1965-1980, a collection presentation at Tate Britain, London; Vital Signs, Artists and the Body, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2024-2025); Women in Revolt! Art, Activism and the Women’s Movement in the United Kingdom 1970 – 1990, Whitworth, Manchester (2025), travelled from Tate Britain, London (2023-24) and The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2024-25); and Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood, Dundee Contemporary Arts (2025), travelled from Arnolfini, Bristol (2024), Midlands Art Centre, Birmingham (2024) and Millennium Gallery, Sheffield (2024-25). She is currently included in the exhibition, Echo Delay Reverb, at Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2025-2026).
Kelly’s work has been the subject of major institutional exhibitions at ICA, London (1976 and 1993); Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (1977); Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (1986); New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY (1990); Vancouver Art Gallery (1991); Generali Foundation, Vienna (1998); Santa Monica Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2001); Center for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw (2008); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2010); Whitworth, Manchester (2011); Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC (2019); and Art Gallery of Guelph, Ontario (2023), travelled from De La Cruz Art Gallery, Georgetown University, Washington, DC (2022). In addition to the 2024 edition, Kelly was represented in the 1991 and 2004 Whitney Biennials; Documenta 12, Kassel (2007); Biennale of Sydney (1982 and 2008); and Desert X Biennale Coachella Valley, CA (2019). In 2015, she was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.
Kelly’s work is included in numerous public collections, including Tate, London; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; MOCA, Los Angeles, CA; Arts Council England; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; New Museum, New York, NY; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and many others. In 2017, Kelly’s archive was acquired by the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA.
