Collage and the Kaleidoscope
Yasmeen Siddiqui
Nosing around her studio, I am enmeshed in an unfolding psychological thriller mastered by this painter who when we first met was assembling visual cuts from magazines and books, these excerpts from domestic life. Duffield has assimilated profound lessons from collage, leading her to figure out ways to harness control and look inwards, allowing painting to guide her in the refracting of elements: children, plants, furniture, housewares. This move from meditating on the home and the interplay of mother, child, children, spouse, to tearing at the seams of homelife to release the tension and anguish defining this story of motherhood is the work I think is underway.
An optimistic palette suggests good taste. At a glance the picture is harmonious. A longer look and you are pushed off balance. A reliance on a flat surface built of a singular color asserts a baseline feeling. I infer struggle in each color. The perfection, the balance, the subtlety that is declared through muted pink or robin’s egg blue is set off with mustard yellows and gold or verdant greens and royal blue, orange at either end. The consistent arrangement of color blocks is the set in this theatre with its ensemble cast—alerting me: she is teasing out an interplay of forces, inanimate and animate. These swathes of base or background color are strangely dominant. What would it be to strip each painting to a singular color: removing every figure, flower, exaggerated tool, textile pattern, piece of Danish modern furniture? Would just a field of color, from the palette Kelly argues for, render me distraught, amused, disoriented, angry as her current works do? The figures and forms, are they a distraction?
These psychological portraits remind me of the blurring that happens between mother-figure and those being tended to. Her grappling with the difficulty of maintaining poise, excellence, competence becomes pronounced when the canvas grows, when the base color assumes more of my time and attention. The scaling up Untitled V, 2019 (fig. a) a modest 12” x 11” collage that seems to now function as a study, comes into full form as Same Same I (cat. 2), a 42”x40” acryla gouache canvas. She is now destabilizing this picture. The larger rendition of this composition, as a painting, moves far beyond figures and color arranged to communicate what she observes. A pert terrier has jumped up on a two-seat sofa and is ready to leap, calling to a headless girl, held in air standing on a wooden swing, she is faceless. Ropes holding the swing seat, perhaps attach to a branch. That isn’t in the picture. The girl’s head is a flower connected to her body, also by rope. Looking at the collage and then the painting, noting what can be arrived at when Kelly assumes space, paints larger, and commands color, her work is gaining courage. When Kelly assumes total control over color, shucking collage, we are invited to feel not simply look. We confront the noose.
The paintings over three years have shifted past observational mind maps, into psychological portraits, perhaps of the artist. As if reconciling her accounts, she posits well-dressed idealized child figures on the top of houses, tables, a chesterfield, often indoors, and usually with feet planted, always, perversely, there is an uncanny feeling of suspension. What when we first met were whimsical arrangements of objects and headless figures that spoke to a mayhem played by five kids, has morphed. The paintings are moving beyond a very sound symbology of birth and rebirth, hierarchy and dependences, to a reckoning—an almost dystopian looking upon the angst underpinning a stylized affluent suburban life.
ABOUT THE WRITER: Yasmeen Siddiqui is the founding director of Minerva Projects, a not-for-profit to support artists, writers and curators, through exhibitions and publications programs. She is a curator, writer and lecturer, committed to voicing unorthodox stories that traverse and toy with prevailing political and art historical categories.