Kelly Pretty

“Who would have thought the terminal cancer diagnosis of my best friend would prepare me for my sister. Well that is how it played out.

H O Matic series the embroidery pieces I included in mm3 were drawings my son did as he visited me in hospital; the love, care and attention to detail and what he thought would cheer me did the trick, the power of art. I shelved the drawings not wanting to share my experiences until suddenly I was driven to translate these into embroidery’s, the healing power of stitch, red: the thread of life, the time you have with the work is like real time with another person as you think of them, feel them in your heart. Redwork has been a part of my practice for over a decade originally, I would do them when on the move, the mobile studio but now just whenever the mood takes me I’ll start a new series.

Rose Meyer invited me to be part of the exhibition, an artist and human I greatly admire, we share a common denominator of repetition and a love of drawing which spurred me on to complete the entire series, I was all set to drop them off when a phone call arrived - my parents back from the airport having collected Dad off the plane after surgery for Melanoma, arrived home to find my Nana had suffered a stroke. I jumped on a plane and came home to family; the day before Nana had her stroke my best friend had rung to share the heart breaking news she was heading in on Monday for biopsies on her lung and it wasn’t looking good. I bumped into her in the corridors of the hospital on her way to that appointment when heading for a cuppa in the canteen, a moment away from Nana’s bedside. My heart was breaking is a real and felt emotion and physical embodiment of pain. The dizzying incomprehension of life.”

When I received the email invitation to write about the show I was back home with family again, this time as my sister had been diagnosed during Covid 19 lockdown with stage 4 terminal cancer, every day I visit her in the Hospice as the specialist team work stabilising her to go home again and let the angels of chemo do their job on the tumours. My son did another special drawing Dog-Matic for her which I embroidered, what more can you do when you can’t make anything ‘better’, for me it’s art.  It sits in her room at the hospice, the healing power of stitch, the love of one human for another doing what they can to bring a smile and warm a heart in such uncertain times. 

6 months latter and my best friend is glowing, the chemo has nuked some of her tumours and life giving immunotherapy has given her a new normal; my Dad had his 6 month check up and is all clear, glows of hope within the darkness. Nana passed away with 95 amazing years behind her, she was still driving her manual car with no power steering 2 weeks before she had the stroke. A life well lived..”

Kelly Pretty x mothermother 2020

“As an artist, Pretty not only believes in, but also actively experiments with the intimate relations between art and social living. Whilst drawing and painting comprise the foundation of her artistic practice, she also works with a variety of techniques and mediums from embroidery, social engagement, posters, printmaking, collage, mixed media, textiles, found objects and recycled goods. Thematically, her works reject impersonal abstraction in favour of a multiplicity of pre-personal and super-personal stylistic wanderings. They align themselves with the 'outsides' of worlds in the sense given by Deleuze and Guattari (2007) when they write, "Sorcerers have always held the anomalous position, at the edge of the fields or woods. They haunt the fringes". In this spirit, Pretty's works concern themselves not so much with theory and fashion, but rather with affectivity and conjuration, that is, with powers to affect and be affected by a world in its creative evolution.” Dr Leon Tan.