Deborah Kelly

Deborah Kelly’s practice encompasses collage, installation, event and performance. Her projects are often collaborative and concerned with lineages of representation, politics and history in public exchange. Some of Kelly’s projects originate as political practices and others are picked up by cultural institutions. Her best-known work is probably still Hey, Hetero!, a series of advertisements for heterosexual privilege made with photographer Tina Fiveash in 2001. Beware of the God (2005), commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, appeared across Sydney as postcards, videos and vast projections onto clouds. No Human Being Is Illegal (2014–19), for the Biennale of Sydney, unfolded through hundreds of collage workshops and is now in the collection of the Wellcome Trust in London. Other projects have involved political billboards, a danced memorial, 25,000 black armbands, and countless free posters, stickers and postcards. Kelly’s current artwork is CREATION; a queer insurrectionary science fiction climate change religion iterated across every artform. She has been working on CREATION since 2019, but she feels she's been working up to it her entire life.