Make History with Deborah Kelly

Explore the art of collage and learn the practices of cutting and composition with award-winning artist Deborah Kelly. In this two-day workshop, learn to play purposefully with pictures and develop a range of technical skills to create original works that make the old new again.

Delivered with technical demonstrations, discussion and storytelling, join Deborah Kelly to reimagine and deconstruct the past in playful and poignant ways. This workshop will help you turn history on its head with bold and beautiful revisions, resistances and reinterpretations.

You’ll work with a selection of vintage and antique materials from Deborah’s personal archives.

About the artist:

Deborah Kelly’s projects often start outside of art institutions, and some of them stay there. Posters for social movements, printable window protest signs and a billboard that ended up in the Mardi Gras parade; a danced memorial for the Tiananmen Square protests, disseminated on YouTube and performed in cities around the world.

Kelly’s projects across media are concerned with lineages of representation, politics and history, and practices of collectivity from epic to intimate. Kelly has exhibited extensively around Australia, and in the Biennale's of Singapore, Sydney, Thessaloniki, TarraWarra, Cementa and Venice. She is currently founding a queer insurrectionary science fiction climate change religion called CREATION.

Book

Participant requirements:

Participants must arrive on time but are welcome to leave as they choose.

Materials provided: Paper, glue, mats, brushes and knives; some vintage imagery from Kelly’s personal archive.

Materials to bring: You are welcome to bring vintage reference books/art books/journals with images to cut up, especially those with matte paper are perfect. Damaged is fine. Black and white is fine. Thin shiny paper is hard to use, so please choose carefully.