Kelly Ballett

For me, painting exists as a fluidly libidinal medium that reflects the social conditions and mutable value form through which it operates. Painting is as such an analogous space. When employed as a speculative technology, painting can formalise social relations and embed them in material practice.

My practice explores linguistic grammars and the morphology of visual language. I look at the role of images in circulation, particularly how they reinforce current forms of power. These activities are in response to the insidious growth of totalising systems and coded violence that increasingly regulate vernacular visual culture.

I navigate and re-stage historical material in an effort to critically reroute the operative logic of Capital as expressed in its power to fragment, unitise and ultimately homogenise culture. As I move through and access different temporalities, I am led to question the very notion of The Contemporary as an aim or end in itself.

My work interrupts the fluency of the semiotic strategies of control and questions the solidity and legitimacy of current social relations. In doing so, I aim to reveal the origins and influence of social codes seemingly located in the past–condensed in moments of great rupture, during periods of material crisis and technological change–and how these ossified social relations persist within our current political condition.

Painting can be used as an apparatus for the libidinal analysis of Middle England.

(image: 'Chicken' 2021, (180cm x 153cm) Acrylic, canvas)