Perspectives: Heather Ryan Kelley

Discomfort is second nature to mixed-media artist Heather Ryan Kelley. Unfazed by perplexity, she finds inspiration in exploring quandaries, particularly those presented by early twentieth-century literature. Over the past two decades, the bulk of Kelley’s work has grappled with the writings of Irish author James Joyce. Kelley was first exposed to Joyce’s earlier works—his novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and short story collection Dubliners—as a freshman at Southern Methodist University. She found them so enthralling that her professor recommended she wrestle with Joyce’s Ulysses next.

“When I read it, I felt like I’d come home,” said Kelley, speaking by phone from her studio at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, where she’s taught for the last thirty-five years. “I had ideas for drawings almost immediately.” 

Once she conquered Ulysses, it was a natural progression to Finnegan’s Wake, Joyce’s notoriously onerous final work bent on baffling voracious fiction lovers and scholars alike. Kelley remembers her SMU professor describing it as an “ineffable book.”

Finnegan’s Wake is the type of novel that demands to be read aloud. Hearing the text phonetically makes it easier to understand, said Kelley, and it’s this physical exchange she strives to convey in her art. Rather than simply illustrate the text—an impossible feat, she said—her work is a constant interrogation of it. Kelley works through Finnegan’s Wake using collage, painting, printmaking, and artist books, and her range of media allows her to expand her interpretations of the text by using tangible elements to reflect Joyce’s fragmented style. “I’ve been pleasantly caught in Finnegan’s Wake for this many years,” she said. That’s no surprise given Joyce spent seventeen years writing his novel. “It’s difficult, it’s full of enigmas. It’s such an experimental novel that it really lends itself to experimentation.”

Hearing the text phonetically makes it easier to understand, said Kelley, and it’s this physical exchange she strives to convey in her art.

In her current series, titled The Midden Heap Project, Kelley is creating a collage for each of the 638 pages of Finnegan’s Wake. She weaves her narrative alongside Joyce’s, at once separate and indistinguishable. “Joyce’s novels are autobiographical in a sense, and I can work my own autobiography in a parallel kind of way to what Joyce is doing in his work,” said Kelley.

[Read this: In a Houma bookstore, two million titles and two decades of success.]

Similar to her approach construing Joyce, Kelley’s paintings integrate a vocabulary of found objects to form one piece. Her still-life paintings often depict traditional vanitas imagery, such as flowers or bubbles, which are meant to convey the brevity of life. Kelley adds personal symbols to the pieces, like piles of debris or origami, or possessions that belonged to her mother. 

“I’m interested in not simply replicating existing conventional imagery associated with vanitas painting, but to come up with a personal set of images, a vocabulary if you will,” she said. “The collection of the things I have here—a lot of them are fragile—they have a certain personality and tenderness to them.”  

Heather Ryan Kelley has been a member of the Baton Rouge Gallery since 2013. She established The Midden Heap Press in 2009. Her work has appeared at the New York Public Library, the James Joyce Centre in Dublin, the University of Toronto, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp. Find her work at heatherryankelley.com.

In September, Kelley will be profiled on LPB’s Art Rocks, the weekly showcase of visual and performing arts hosted by Country Roads publisher James Fox-Smith. Tune in Friday, September 20, at 8:30 pm or Saturday, September 21, at 5:30 pm across the LPB network. lpb.org/artrocks.