Collection: Mary Kelly

Mary Kelly (born 1941) is an American-born British artist whose work has been central to feminist art practice and theory since the early 1970s. Her major work Post-Partum Document (1973–79) recorded and analysed the first six years of her son’s life through documentation, psychoanalytic theory, diagrams, stained liners and handwritten texts — a sustained investigation of mother–child relations, language acquisition and the construction of sexual difference. The work drew on Lacanian psychoanalysis and was among the most theoretically ambitious and publicly controversial works produced in Britain during the decade. Kelly’s subsequent practice continued to engage with feminism, memory, ageing and the representation of women, and she has been an influential writer and teacher as well as a practising artist.