As Finnegans Wake so richly demonstrates, what goes around, comes around. Modernist
painting succeeds historical academicism. Modernism is interrogated and
discounted by post-modern deconstruction. And, in Heather Ryan Kelley's body of
work, both the conventions of academic history painting and the multifarious
juxtapositions of modernist collage are used to illuminate Finnegans Wake, a book by a modern author that has been embraced by postmodern academics.
Kelley is an artist, of Irish-American descent, who was born in Connecticut and has lived for several years in Lake Charles, Louisiana. There, she is a full professor at McNeese State University, as well as a fan of professional wrestling and a devoted reader of James Joyce. Kelley's studio, which occupies much of the ground floor of her wood-frame Victorian house, is crammed with store-bought knick knacks and toys, pieces of junk and kitsch collectibles, along with paintings, as rigorously disciplined as they are voluptuous, and works on paper that visually interpret Joyce's writing.
Kelley is not the first artist, artist-poseur or gifted amateur with a sketch pad to address or be inspired by Joyce's writing. The inventory of distinguished 20th-century artists who've made images of Joyce or have attempted to dramatize or illustrate his work encompasses Brancusi, Henri Matisse, Robert Motherwell, John Cage, Jackson Pollock and Joseph Beuys, among others. But both modern masters and such ambitious dabblers in the visual realm as Wyndham Lewis seem to have limited themselves to two strategies: Allusive sketches of Joycean subjects and of Joyce, himself; and abstract works, independent of subject matter, that could claim an affinity to Joyce's so-called free association.
It's as if the prospect of illuminating writing so resistant to what might be called visually literal interpretation -- not the early works, but Ulysses and, particularly, the Wake -- has proven too daunting. How to make visual works that can claim their own identity, yet manage a genuine faithfulness to the text and, furthermore, say something worth saying? But, having followed the development of Kelley's enterprise for almost a decade, I'd suggest she has found thoughtful and cunning ways in which to be her own artist and Joyce's, as well.
Kelley was introduced to Joyce while a freshman at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. At the time, she was reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the short stories in Dubliners. Ulysses, she recalls, was held out to her as the next level of challenge for the reader of Joyce and Finnegans Wake as the ultimate, ineffable experience. Like countless readers around the world, Kelley bought a copy of Ulysses and kept it, unread, for years.
Finally, after graduation, marriage and the birth of a son, Kelley picked up Ulysses and read it. Then she re-read it two or more times. And then she began a series of paintings in relation to the work. That was in 1989. In 1992, Kelley completed what had become a group of 100 small paintings, in styles ranging from fluid abstraction to tight realism, that touched on broad themes and details, alike, from Ulysses. Having become aware of this project, which was presented as an exhibition at the municipal art center in Irving, Texas, I prepared to view it with mingled excitement and skepticism.
Long story short: The exhibition featured the little pictures, but also a number of large-scale works, by a real painter's painter. The physicality of the work was what first struck me but, then, Kelley's keen choice of motifs could not have been more on target. By way of example, her painting for The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit was and is a gorgeous analogue for Joyce's ripe text: Glistening paint and luscious color create a night sky one might wish to pick and eat.
At the same time, having finished her Ulysses project, Kelley had gone on to a first reading of Finnegans Wake and -- with an apparent sense of stunning self-confidence -- had completed some paintings in relation to that writing: Those were the large pictures on view in the Irving gallery. In particular, Kelley's picture of cool, blonde Issy gazing at herself in a small handmirror convinced me that, if anyone could illuminate the work as an exiled Irishman's history of the world, it would be Kelley.
But after a flurry of encounters in the early 1990s, Kelley and I fell out of touch for several years -- perhaps because each of us coincidentally had taken a break from our independent Joyce studies. Then, about a year ago, Kelley contacted me about her more recent work. She'd been doing small collages in relation to other, broader, subjects. That experience, in turn, had prompted her to reconsider her treatment of the Wake. Rather than focusing on moments within the text that suggested visual images, then interpreting them in terms of allegory and other conventions of history painting, Kelley took something of a surrealist turn: She began working with the fragmentary dynamics of the book, employing collage to translate its jostling, overlapping cycles of verbal allusion into visual images.
Doublin' All the Time (1997) is an example: As in many of Kelley's other collages, color is toned down and graphic structure and surface texture become of greater importance than they are in the paintings. Like a page of letters grouped into words, strung into sentences that are organized into paragraphs, the collages overall are constructed from rectangular shapes. Notable emphasis is put on images of hands: Hands manipulating chopsticks; hands held out, palms up for scrutiny by a reader; a hand (certainly the cad's) holding a pipe; a hand holding a fountain pen and writing a letter.
And Kelley's favorite references in Finnegans Wake are to Shem the Penman, the ink-spattered wretch, who made of his own body a manuscript. Could Joyce have grasped the degree to which Shem's shenanigans presage performance art? Did he ever imagine that his own scrabbles and scratches and scriobbles would inspire Jackson Pollock and Abstract Expressionism?
The hand, the body, the mind. The artist. The artist seeks to do what he or she must do and uses whatever means available -- including the pen and the brush, including selfishness and self-discipline, including the mind and the hands and an arena within which to act and foolscap upon which to mark.
The artist knows the subject to be addressed and transformed, one through which a unique vision will be communicated. It could be history, which is shaped through selection of events, ideas and words. It could be literature, that of the Bible, the Book of Kells, the works of Shakespeare or Sterne or Joyce. Or the philosophy of Vico and Bruno. The canon is mixed with the profanity of daily life, as the artist nudges, pushes and models material, constantly responding to what is seen or heard in the work in progress.
James Joyce, the Bygmester, constructed Finnegans Wake, using his mind as if it were hands, laying on material, turning it over, considering the fit. He used his ears in the same way, listening to the interaction of the words, listening to how they looked on the page. The senses all have their own intelligence, as any artist will tell you.
Joyce's intelligence is recognized, even as its profundity and freshness continue to be revealed. Heather Ryan Kelley, a college professor in Lake Charles, with all due humility and arrogance, is excavating Joyce for further revelations, as she senses and perceives them. In the process she reveals herself as an artist of distinction.
Janet S. Tyson
Fort Worth, 2002
