The kiln

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

This 1950 painting by Felix Kelly shows a labourer on the edge of a vast precipice. Behind him, a dilapidated kiln and three tall telephone poles are juxtaposed strangely against the expansive sky and mountain top. The man holds several limp cables which extend out of the picture plane, attached to some unseen object. With the palette of muted colours, the mood is one of lonely isolation against the sublime landscape.

Although born in New Zealand, Kelly left for Britain in 1935 at the age of twenty-one, never to return to his home country. In London, he developed quite a reputation for his neo-romantic paintings of architecture and domestic interiors, and spent his career executing dozens of commissions in wealthy households all over the world. He was influenced by the British surrealist scene of the 1940s, painting a number of works that explored the darker psychology of these places. Dotted with crumbling English architecture, Kelly’s surrealist paintings create a dream-like alternative to the glamorous estates he normally painted — though these works, too, are often tinged with a sense of strangeness and alienation.

Outmoded forms of technology are a recurring motif in Kelly’s paintings, symbolising the rapid changes of the modern industrial world. Kelly often placed these, as here, against magnificent mountain landscapes — perhaps a sign he hadn’t left New Zealand behind entirely. In this painting, Kelly focuses on the decaying bottle kilns that dotted the industrial landscape of Stoke-on-Trent, long the epicentre of pottery manufacturing in Britain. At the time of this painting, however, the industry had already started to suffer from the steep decline in British manufacturing that would eventually see the collapse of local industrial production.

Against the vast space of the mountain skies, Kelly’s lone labourer seems exiled from his old way of life. The kiln decays behind him. Hanging on to telephone lines, he seems to maintain a tenuous grip on the connection with the outside world. Although the slack wire connects it to something beyond the scene, this only serves to enhance the sense of dislocation and alienation in Kelly’s nostalgic yet unsettling work.

Chelsea Nichols