Harbour Sharon Kelly

This new body of work, inspired by research into personal family history from Co Mayo, is a contemplation on what lies hidden or undetected and how this might shape our sense of self and connection to the world. The artist explores the complexities of concealment and emotional burden, utilising the materiality of worn clothing, sewing patterns, and other fragile media, revealing echoes of past lives; pondering absences and the unfulfilled. Pockets offer spaces where secrets or forgotten things or places may be hidden, quietly harbouring the precious or burdensome. In excavating personal history, Kelly links themes of intimacy, emotional weight and burden, particularly from the female point of view and experience.

About the Artist:

Kelly’s practice mediates between memory, experience and imagination, working across drawing, painting, print, sculpture, installation and video. Concerned with the marking and mapping of human experience, and with themes of fragility, resilience, liminality and transformation, Kelly draws from personal experience, and observation, taking reference from diverse sources including, dressmaking, medicine, the human form, landscape and sport.

She is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards and fellowships, most recently the Major Individual Artist Award, Arts Council of Northern Ireland 2023; Frans Masereel Centrum, Belgium, International Printmaking Residency 2023; The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, New York, USA, 2022. In 2020 she was awarded the Arts Council of Northern Ireland Fellowship at the British School of Rome, Italy. In 2000 she was invited to undertake a Fellowship at The Ballinglen Arts Foundation, in Ballycastle and it is there that she returned in late 2024, developing ideas for this exhibition. Kelly lives and works between Belfast and Co Armagh.