Kelly Pretty

Driven by outside
forces floating like the dust
enveloping me

Thematically, Pretty's works reject increasingly rational-legal and fashionable trends (such as politics, historical referencing and critique, and deconstruction) in favour of an exploration of what have become dirty words - spirit, affection, passion, and inspiration. Specifically, her work rejects impersonal abstraction in favour of a multiplicity of pre-personal and super-personal stylistic wanderings of a life. If the affective powers of these images are anything to go by, it is a life that is always coming to know and embrace the very impersonal and inhuman flows of intensity and non-sense characterizing an outside which so much contemporary art functions as a shield or weapon against. Not only a courageous life, but also one that learns against tides of capitalizing cruelty, the powers of affection and sorcery in the inhuman stream of becoming that is a world's life. Such lessons are never learnt anywhere inside. "Sorcerers have always held the anomalous position, at the edge of the fields or woods. They haunt the fringes" (Deleuze & Guattari, 2007). Occupying the fringes is a life wary of cages and shackles that lead to the tragedy of becoming "human, all t...

MFA(hons)