By Elliott Higgs
The artist greets you in the entranceway; a sole figure standing in a seemingly vast and otherwise empty desert plateau. She faces away from the viewer, towards the landscape's horizon, where the sun flares over distant mountain ranges. The white umbrella which rests against her shoulder appears, strangely, to offer illumination rather than shade. Two shadowy silhouettes overlap in the centre of its canopy, which is turned towards us, and printed around its circumference is a quiet manifesto: ‘We don’t want to set the world on fire’.
The photograph, installed here as an almost 2-metre-tall lightbox, provides an appropriately contemplative opening for an exhibition that sees the conceptual and feminist artist Mary Kelly ruminating on the role of protest across her five decades plus creative career. It was taken for her 2019 project Peace is the Only Shelter, a site-specific installation in the Mojave Desert paying tribute to Women Strike for Peace, a group of activists who mobilised in 1961 to demonstrate against nuclear weapons testing in the area. The slogan which adorns Kelly’s umbrella, and from which the exhibition takes its title, was one of many chanted by the group when they occupied the same desert region where the artist now stands, alone but no less defiant, expressing the same very human desire for sanctuary.
Throughout her body of work, Kelly has consistently foregrounded the intersections of the personal and the political, using narrative, documentary, and archival practices to expose how individual subjectivity is shaped by larger social, historical, and geopolitical forces. Her videos and installations of the early 1970s transcribe her experiences of pregnancy and motherhood against the backdrop of the UK Women’s Liberation Movement, employing radically unconventional materials (such as her child’s soiled nappy liners) and duration as a method, returning repeatedly to themes of labour, language, and domesticity.
The six-part project Post-Partum Document (1973–79) remains a landmark of feminist conceptualism, not only for its excoriating interrogation of the material and semiotic languages of maternity, but also for its insistence that the ‘private’ realm of childcare is inseparable from the public workings of society. By weaving autobiography together with collective histories in this way, Kelly’s work resists singular, personal narratives. Instead, protest and progress are proposed as ongoing, cumulative, diegetic processes: ones that often unfold, at first, by way of small, principled acts of resistance.
Turning into the gallery at Pippy Houldsworth, the eye is caught by the glare of Circa 2011 (2016), a large-scale projection of a pockmarked scene just barely recognisable as a crowd of demonstrators, holding banners and signs aloft in a concentrated circle which forms the composition’s centre. Dark areas of the image have been inverted into light, an effect heightened by the projector's beam, such that the scene seems to hover between documentation and abstraction – an aerial photograph that refuses at first to cohere into an easily legible image. A small page of neatly typed verse installed nearby acts as a kind of poetic key, identifying the photograph as a piece of citizen journalism from the 2011 Tahir Square protests in Cairo, part of the so-called Arab Spring.
The work is crossed with a rectangular grid, with eleven of its units demarcated in a deep red. These serve to direct viewers' attention to the many individual moments which the overarching snapshot captures in aggregate; people holding banners, a group constructing campsites, and parents marching alongside their children – although it is unclear whether these reports stem from personal testimony or the artist’s own speculations. Yet even with these moments of clarity the image remains unstable, a fleeting archive of an instant that was lived in real time but circulated later, through phone screens, newspapers and social media feeds.
Standing up close to Circa 2011, another source of this ephemeral quality comes into view: the entire scene is constructed from compressed lint, a medium Kelly first adopted in the late 1990s for her project Mea Culpa (1999). Ever since, the artist has collected the fibrous detritus from the filter screen of her domestic dryer unit and compressed it into moulded panels for use in her work. It’s really the perfect medium for Kelly – an incidental material of both physical and conceptual labour through which the residue of everyday life is transformed into a signifier of mediated memory. It gestures toward that which is both intimately familiar and culturally disregarded: domestic labour, practices of care, or the ways in which world events filter through the rhythms of everyday life.
Elsewhere in the room other works in lint haunt the walls, fragments and outtakes from Kelly’s earlier projects, issues of the past reappearing in the present. In Tucson, 1972 (2017), the delicate recreation of an airmail letter viscerally evokes the anxieties of living with the Vietnam War as a backdrop to daily life; the handwriting illegible at times amongst rows of blue-grey rectangles. London, 1974 (2017), woven in red and grey lint, recalls the artist’s past experiences of communal living in the city – baking, painting, and negotiating childcare alongside political engagements. These and other works nearby crystallise what Kelly has described as ‘the unconscious process of remembering both personally and collectively’, an accrual of traces that resists straightforward chronology, fragmented through the fragile lens of memory.
Dominating the far wall of the gallery is Kelly’s World on Fire Timeline (2020). This monumental mixed-media work unfolds 71 years of global conflict and protest, from the early nuclear arms race to civil rights struggles and the contemporary climate crisis. Rather than advancing as an altogether linear narrative however, the timeline samples and remixes fragments of Kelly’s own practice alongside archival ephemera – letters, newspaper clippings, and lint panels from earlier series – evoking the experience of looking back from the present having lived through history.
Central to the timeline’s logic is a tickertape of world events interspersed with experiences from the artist’s own life, announcing the birth of her grandson in the same breath as the Paris Climate Agreement. Doomsday Clock motifs also feature here, their creeping minutes to midnight registering the oscillating proximity of global catastrophe. Across its six panels, the work forms a kind of temporal palimpsest in which public events and private life are written over one another. This is by no means a reassuring narrative of inevitable advancement but rather a study of cycles, ruptures, and intergenerational continuity; protest as a repeated, imperfect response to the world’s persistent threats.
Taken as a whole, We don’t want to set the world on fire is as much a reckoning with historical form as it is with content. While the personal remains very much political, the result is more a meditation on the provisional nature of progress: victories arrive and recede, setbacks recur, and the possibility of change is never guaranteed. As Kelly herself has suggested, her work does not offer facile hope, nor does it succumb to despair; it simply asks what it means to bear witness, and to remember, even when the narratives we recover might be fragmentary and fraught.
