Déirdre Kelly

ABOUT

DÉIRDRE KELLY plays with the language of cartography to create her own personalised maps,
operating a kind of in-built personal GPS system, from which emerge impossible landscapes, routes and directions, oscillating between land and water as observed from her studio view in Venice looking out towards Canal Grande

Drawn to the intrinsic beauty of the map, as a primary source of beauty, inspiration, and education. her work uses a combination of mixed-media images, collage and artists’ books that re-purpose data from various found sources in order to construct new visual and metaphorical narratives.

Works which continue in the tradition of the magical world of wonder encapsulated in hand-drawn maps and atlases of the past, in the belief that there is a human need and desire for physical maps, now more than ever. The mechanisms and language key to reading maps provide a kind of ‘grounding’, a ‘grip’ on the world, a fundamental connection with people, place and time.

Behind every map there is a person : behind every person is a map.