Mary Kelly

Mary Kelly’s London, 1974 looks to a formative period, both for the artist personally and for the women’s liberation movement. The work comprises two letters from her archive formed in gridded panels of compressed lint – one written by a friend from the commune in Pimlico where Kelly was living, the other from the same friend’s daughter. The 1970s saw new ideas about cohabitation, childcare and domesticity discussed within feminist dialogue – London, 1974 presents differing contemporaneous perspectives on this experience. Each section of the grid is formed by multiple cycles in the artist’s tumble dryer. Presenting a blurred image, Kelly’s unique medium prompts reflection on memory and the passing of time through the slow accumulation of lint. Whilst the text of the letters is difficult to read in parts, putting distance between the viewer and the authors, the replication of handwriting elicits a more direct, emotional relationship. Created several decades after the event, London, 1974 (2017) questions what defines that moment in feminist history and what constitutes its relationship to the present.