Anna Schwartz Painting

Kelly Manning's professional career in visual arts spans a 20 year period. For most of that, she has resided in Melbourne and has formal training in printmaking and painting and holds a degree with honors in Drawing from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. During that time, she also completed an artist in residence program at St Vincent's Hospital for a period of 9 months. This residency prompted her visit to Vietnam to research the Vietnam War and its after effects. Residing in Hanoi for 7 months enabled Manning to immerse herself in the Vietnamese culture, and she then produced The Quiet, a solo show about the resilience of the Vietnamese for Maroondah Regional Gallery. As a child of a Vietnam Veteran, Manning had an early insight on war and a dark view of the world. Manning's father was obsessed with his experience as a soldier and collected every book, video and memorabilia he could find. His extensive collection of war was Manning's visual experience of the outside world - morbid and grotesque. Manning began producing art cathartically, through the mediums of painting and printmaking. Also compelled to explore a troubled childhood, her focus was of the anatomy, the diseased and toxic body, forensics and the psychologically disturbed mind. As such, her works produced between the periods of 1992 and 2001 were mono-toned, abject and visceral in subject matter; causing her studio space to be named "˜The Morgue'. After her first journey to Vietnam, Manning began introducing colour symbolically, to expose the atrocities she felt were displayed during and after the Vietnam war. She experimented by mixing printmaking and painting processes, using enamel, stamping and stenciling. She also developed a method using spraying which was an idea formed from the study of the spraying of Agent Orange over Vietnam and latex, a major commodity of South Vietnam. In 2009, Manning was commissioned to produce work for Nam Bang at Casula Powerhouse Museum, an exhibition exploring all angles of the Vietnam War with a focus on the next generation. This resulted in a published book of essays written for Nam Bang by writers such as the curator Boitran Beattie and the American art critic Lucy Lippard. Of late, Manning has moved away from her previous focus on the Vietnam War. Though currently engaged in the human condition and the experience of living in a deteriorating world, her more recent works seek resolution and peace.