Street Love

---

View fullsize

Street Love
Projection and light installation, sizes variable, Felicity Park | Caloundra, QLD
2 Oct – 4 Oct 2020 | Projections in Felicity Park
2 Oct – 30 Oct 2020 | Window light boxes over Felicity Park

Street Love celebrates community space as a place of consideration and wonder. Curator and artist, Kellie O’Dempsey, invited audiences to share in a participatory exchange through perceptual experience incorporating projection, video, sound and light installation. Street Love includes artwork by Kellie O’Dempsey, Adam Anderson, CLUNKK (Sophie Reid-Singer) and sound by Mick Dick. Together these artists explore the relationship between the physical environment, light, and colour while utilising video to create new interpretations of familiar places.

Place2Play was a creative public activation program in line with the Caloundra Public Art Plan. The project brought temporary and permanent artwork to our streets and laneways, inspiring new ways for residents and visitors to experience and rediscover Caloundra.

Links | Place2Play
Credits | Photographer: Tim Birch, The Artist

Continuum

---

View fullsize

Continuum
Exhibition: 24 Aug - 1 Sep 2019
The Old Ambo, Nambour as part of Horizon Festival | Sunshine Coast, QLD
Kellie O’Dempsey | Sound: Michael Dick | Augmented Reality: Helena Papageorgiou

Continuum brings together video, drawing and performance in an installation exploring process and possibility. These works present the ever-changing moment as line and action. Revealing drawing as transformation, using both traditional and digital means, the artist is seen drawing and un-drawing lines in a mesmerising continuum of making.

Links: Horizon Festival | Facebook

Horizon Festival was supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland

Outside the Lines

---

View fullsize

Image credit: Jono Searle

Outside the Lines
Performance: 24 May 2019 | Exhibition: 10 May - 11 Aug 2019
Museum of Brisbane as part of BAD Festival | Brisbane, QLD
Kellie O’Dempsey | Sound: Mick Dick | Performers: Saara Roppola and Maris Georgiou

Immerse yourself in a haven of colour, light and sound, as performance and installation artist Kellie O’Dempsey places audiences right in the middle of her artwork, which fuses digital drawing, performance, animated video projection and sound.

For BRISBANE ART DESIGN (BAD), Kellie teamed up with sound designer Mick Dick and performers Saara Roppola and Marisa Georgiou to perform new work and engage in discussions about their co-operative making process.

Links: Instagram | Brisbane Art and Design (BAD)

Credits | Photographer: Jono Searle

Botanica

---

Photographer: Cian Sanders

Botanica
10 May 2019 | Live performance
City Botanic Gardens as part of Botanica by Night | Brisbane, QLD
Curated by UAP (Urban Art Projects) Botanica 2019 was a signature event of the Museum of Brisbane's inaugural Brisbane Art Design (BAD) festival.

Creating live performance drawings from a responsive exchange between line, sound and movement Kellie O’Dempsey opened Brisbane’s annual 2019 contemporary art outside event Botanica. In drawing and animating live lines of light across the surface of the gardens, O'Dempsey simulated the energy of molecules vibrating and growing under the surface of the trees. Employing analogue and digital drawing techniques, Kellie navigated the physical space with line. The performance is the act of drawing and the experience of time that results in a mesmerising state of becoming.

Botanica exhibition is a unique, site-specific art exhibition that has been curated in a contemporary style. Set within Queensland’s heritage garden, providing a complex historical backdrop, the City Botanic Gardens acts as a living museum. Botanica was a signature event of the Museum of Brisbane's inauguralBrisbane Art Design (BAD) festival.

Links: Botanica | Brisbane Art and Design (BAD) | Instagram

Credits | Photographers: Cian Sanders / Faces of Brisbane

Negative Time Echo & The Never-ending –Line

---

Never End Negative Time
Screening at Adelaide Festival Centre | Adelaide, SA

Never End Negative Time brings together two video artworks, The Never-ending –Line and Negative Time Echo, in a lyrical conversation about process and possibility.

Investigating the idea that nothing is ever finished these works present the ever changing moment. Exploring drawing as transformation, using both traditional and digital means, the artist is seen drawing as the lines animate themselves in a mesmerising continuum.

Image credit | The artist

Hardenvale - our home in Absurdia

---

Hardenvale - our home in Absurdia
Rayner Hoff Project Space, National Art School | NSW, Australia
28 March - 20 April 2019
Kellie O’Dempsey, Catherine O’Donnell and Todd Fuller 
Funded by Australia Council for the Arts, with support from Create NSW, The NSW Artists’ Grant (NAVA)
Also supported by the Parramatta Artist Studios and Bundanon Trust Artist in Residence program

Hardenvale – our home in Absurdia is a real-scale, immersive, house-like environment created by Australian artists Catherine O’Donnell, Kellie O’Dempsey and Todd Fuller. Through drawing, projection, built form, sound and movement, this collaborative project references the architecture of 1960s Western Sydney Government housing as well as spaces the group describe as ‘the cultural fringe of Australia’.

Crossing three generations, these artists’ re-imagine lived domestic space while expanding the practice of drawing to create an intimate and unsettling experience. Harvesting images from personal narratives of imperfect moments (both familiar and strange), Hardenvale is a humble dwelling made from drawing in which to spend, lose or find time. This installation invites visitors to reflect on their own experiences and memories of home.

Links | Catalogue

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

Credits | Images - Silversalt Photography, Peter Morgan and the National Art School // Video - Sound: Mick Dick and Cinematography: Emma Conroy

Dirt and Ash

---

View fullsize

Dirt and Ash :: Fiona Fell and Kellie O'Dempsey
20 October – 2 December 2018 | Opening Night 19 October 2018
Gallery 1: The Margaret Olley Gallery, Lismore Regional Gallery | Lismore, Australia
Kellie O’Dempsey and Fiona Fell | Sound: Mick Dick

Kellie O’Dempsey and Fiona Fell perform Dirt & Ash, an immersive multimedia installation about the relationship between the artist and work of art with Mick Dick’s (sound artist) performance on opening night.

Exhibition was opened by Dr Barbara Bolt, Professor in Contemporary Arts and Culture, Victorian College of the Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music.

Dirt and Ash displays a dynamic exchange between two mid-career artists. Fiona Fell and Kellie O'Dempsey explore the links between artists’ bodies, ceramic sculpture and performance drawing and video as they inquire into the nature of each other’s creative processes. As works are built, stacked, re-formed and incorporated through performance and live drawing–the underbelly of their creative practices is exposed.  

Sharing the material relationships of clay and charcoal, the shared experience of loss and survival is uncovered (in terms of life and their creative processes). Fiona Fell and Kellie O'Dempsey dramatise their perseverant search for presence, synchronising moments in the studio as performance.

Links | Catalogue // Lismore Gallery website

Exhibition Images

Performance

Videogragher: Steven Kwan

Exhibition Catalogue

Credits | Photographer: Darcy Grant // Videographer: Steven Kwan

The never-ending line

---

View fullsize

Kellie O'Dempsey: The never-ending line, NGA Play at The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Saturday 16 June – 28 October 2018
National Gallery of Australia | Canberra, Australia

Kellie O’Dempsey invites you into her living sketchbook, an immersive space of moving marks and dancing lines. Digital projections collide with traditional drawing in a series of dynamic and colourful experiences and creative opportunities. Contribute to the unique drawing journey as you follow the never ending line to shadow puppets, 3D drawing constructions and live animation before getting into the drawing rink for an immersive drawing experience. The never-ending line investigates drawing as a way of collaboration and transformation as it features sound elements composed by Mick Dick.

Links: NGA website
Media: SMH Article | City News Article

Exhibition

---

Kellie O’Dempsey and Michael Dick

Performance

Videographer - Sixth Row

Videographer - Sixth Row

Credits | Videographer: Sixth Row

Funded by Australia Council for the Arts, with support from Create NSW, The NSW Artists’ Grant (NAVA)
Also supported by the Parramatta Artist Studios and Bundanon Trust Artist in Residence program

Ensemble

---

View fullsize

Photographer: Andrew Willis

Ensemble
June 2018
Projection on William Jolly Bridge | Brisbane, Australia
For the Brisbane Classic Music Festival
Presented by BRISBANE CITY COUNCIL

Ensemble was originally created live during a performance featuring members of the Shanghai Chamber Ensemble. Describing two of the violinists, the dynamic and bold brush marks were a direct response to the virtuosity of the musicians playing. This drawing interprets the energy and flow of sound through a fluid and liquid application. It creates itself as a direct translation of drawing music in real time.

View fullsize

View fullsize

Credit | Photographer: Andrew Willis

Becoming Becoming

---

View fullsize

Photographer: Angela Little

Becoming Becoming
13 April – 20 May 2018 | Exhibition Opening 13 April 2018
Umbrella Studio Contemporary Arts | Townsville, Australia
Kellie O’Dempsey | Sound: Mick Dick | Dancers: Dance North Felix Samson and Samantha Hines

Becoming Becoming is a dynamic site generated installation that explores the links between the human body, making and transformation through improvisation. Both a live performance and as an exhibition, this work maps processes of collaboration and aliveness through live drawing and collaboration. With Sound artist Mick Dick, Dance North dancers Felix Sampson and Sam Hines the gallery space is expanded through live performance and digital projection. 

Attempting to entice all those who enter Becoming Becoming is a living collage through the flow of line, sound, colour and projection an immersive engaged environment evolves.

Links | Umbrella Studio event page // Invitation

Image credit | Photographer: Angela Little

Moving Through

---

Photographer: Lois Lim | Performer: Marisa Georgiou

Moving Through
Performance at Flowstate | Brisbane, Australia
Saturday 27 October & Sunday 28 October 2018
Kellie O’Dempsey | Sound: Mick Dick | Performers: Saara Rappola & Marisa Georgiou
Produced by Metro Arts and South Bank Corporation 
Funded by Australia Council for the Arts

Moving Through is a spirited, site-generated image and sound performance that imagines the intermediate space between this life and the next.

Performance installation artist Kellie O’Dempsey draws on a personal tale that reveals the importance of ritual when dealing with death. Moving Through maps a guided journey of departure and brings the space to life using digital drawing and animated video projection with physical performers and sound.

Moving Through culminates in two stunning and visceral evening performances.

Links | Flowstate Event Page

Videographer: Thomas Oliver

Credit | Videographer and Photographer: Thomas Oliver

Re-Generating

---

Re-Generating
28 - 29 September 2018
Exhibited as part of Lit Festival, Stories in Light | Toowoomba, QLD
Kellie O’Dempsey | Sound: Michael Dick | Dancer: Ella Colborn

Playing with light, line and the live act, Re-Generating interrogates public and private spaces as shared experience.

Links: Lit Festival | Facebook | Instagram

away and towards

---

Photographer: Louis Lim

away and towards
Valley Metro Shopping Centre, Fortitude Valley | Brisbane, Australia
6 – 7.30pm, 5 October 2017
Kellie O’Dempsey | Sound: Michael Dick | Performers: Marisa Georgiou and Saara Rappola

away and towards is a collaborative exchange between Kellie O’Dempsey, Michael Dick, Marisa Georgiou and Saara Rappola.

This work is an evolving and fluid encounter that signifies the  culmination of a research enquiry into performance drawing as a hybrid and cooperative practice.

The notion of arriving in the present is explored through the use of light, sound, movement and space.

Converging at the intersection of the live event and improvisational exchange, away and towards searches for a destination that is always here.

Performance

Photographers: Robyn Mill and Andy Willis | Videographer: Andy Willis

Resistance Movement

---

Resistance Movement
Kentler International Drawing Space | Brooklyn, New York
January 15 – February 19 2017
Performance + Opening Reception: Sunday, January 15, 4 – 7pm with sounds by guests
Artists’ Talk and final performance: Saturday, January 28, 4pm with musical guest M.A.N.I.A.C. Empire
Ben Gerstein: Trombone | Mike Pride: Percussion | Jonathan Moritz: Saxophone

Kellie O’Dempsey (AUS) and Jennifer Wroblewski (NJ) re-imagine the gallery as a dance hall and a gathering area where pleasure through movement is the only goal, and where the democratic practice of social dance renders all who enter equal and allied.

Resistance Movement aims to enable a shared experience. Together, artists and audience will come to witness an evolving work of light, surface and mark. Marks will be analog and digital, made on paper, and projected into the space. We will respond to music, sound, and one another. Performing a dialogue of drawing and sound in an organised and considered improvisational environment, lines and form will move on, over and through opaque and transparent surfaces. The artists will move around and with the audience, in a drawn game of call and response. Drawing as a record of human movement.

What will remain will be a mapping of performance and cultural exchange. For those present in this Gesamtkunstwerk or whole artwork, they participate in an unfolding collaboration that is both experiential and inclusive.

Resistance Movement is a 2017 rejoinder to the 1970’s Discotheque, the Cabaret/Kabarett of France and Germany prior to WWII–the rave culture of the 1990s. Underground gathering in all of its forms. Dance as protest. The dance hall as a safe haven.

Drawing is the outcome of the friction of the mark-making element on the surface. Resistance and movement are the requirements of the mark.

Links | Resistance Movement catalogue with essay by Charlotta Kotik

Performance

Performance stills

Credits | Photographer: Silvia Forni // Videographer: Gus Frias

Lightening Field

---

Photographer: Naomi O'Reilly

Lightening Field

BARI (Brisbane Artist Run Initiative) Festival | Warehouse, Teneriffe, Brisbane, Australia
7pm - 10pm, Wednesday 19 October 2016

BODY-SONIC-DRAWING
PERFORMANCE EXPERIMENT

KELLIE O’DEMPSEY
MEGAN JANET WHITE
LUKE JAANISTE

Lightening Field brings together, for the first time, the diverse and fluctuating practices of performance drawer Kellie O’Dempsey, installation butoh artist Megan Janet White and sonic artist Luke Jaaniste in a new collaborative work.

The Laundry Artspace is proud to present the premiere performance of LIGHTENING FIELD as part of BARI Festival, within a dishevelled warehouse space in Teneriffe amongst the grime of disused floors, the grift of recent graffiti, and the darkness of night.

Kellie O’Dempsey’s drawing practice is hybrid and diverse, incorporating projection, video, collage, architectural space, gestural line, site-specific installation and live art, through which she explores transformational processes through improvisation and happenstance.  The performance drawing works invite the audience to engage directly with the visceral process of making.  O’Dempsey’s public and private productions aim to enable an inclusive form of cultural interaction via performance and play.

Megan Janet White and Luke Jaaniste are the co-directors of Brisbane-based ensemble Theatre of Thunder.  TOT intertwines butoh dance with immersive sound and atmospheric landscape. Raw and ambient sounds propel the body into a state of poetic rupture and transmutation, whilst illuminated smoke-bubble storms make palpable the fluid dynamic between the sound, body, architecture and audience.

This trio of Brisbane artists has half a century of practice between them and have been featured in major festivals, exhibitions and workshops across Australia and overseas, including Asia Pacific Triennial QAGOMA, Museum of Contemporary Art, White Night Melbourne, MONA FOMO, Draw to Perform Symposium London, dLux, Art After Dark 18 Biennale of Sydney, Prague Quadrennial of Performance and Design, Perspectives on Hijikata Research Collective Japan and hosting international butoh master Kan Katsura.

Links | Catalogue

Credit: Photographs - Aishla Manning & Naomi O'Reilly

Live Performance – NRC

---

View fullsize

Photographer: Natsky

Live Performance – NRC
NRC Silver Jubilee Event | Northern Rivers Conservatorium of Music, Lismore NSW, Commissioned by the Lismore Regional Gallery
15 October 2016

A creative development & presentation program celebrating the Northern Rivers Conservatorium Silver Jubilee and the stories connected to its historic building.

NRC alumni & teachers, local musicians and community with guest conductor Richard Gill and visual artist Kellie O’Dempsey (presented by Lismore Regional Gallery) exhibited a major multi-artform performance in the grounds of the Northern Rivers Conservatorium from 13 – 15 October 2016. The building, which houses the Northern Rivers Conservatorium, has been in educational use for over 100 years and has great significance to generations of Lismore families.

NRC Silver Jubilee partnered with RealArtWorks “The Building(s) Still Lives” to present The Homecoming, providing an opportunity for the whole community to participate in a free multi-artform event that is about their stories.

Credit | Photographer: Natsky

Just Draw – Bathurst

---

Just Draw | Group Exhibition
Bathurst Regional Art Gallery
19 August – 2 October 2016
Opening night performance: 19 August
Curators: Todd Fuller and Lisa Woolfe

Just Draw celebrates drawing and its many possibilities; performance, multimedia, installation, sculpture, kinetics and robotics. Exhibition curators Todd Fuller and Lisa Woolfe present Australian artists who leverage the possibilities of this deceptively simple medium.

Artists include Connie Anthes, Flatline, Hannah Bertram, John Bokor, Matilda Michell, Kelly O’Dempsey, Catherine O’Donnell, Hannah Quinlivan, Jeremy Smith, Jack Stahel, Grant Stewart, Jane Théau and Paul White.

Photographer · Todd Fuller

unSeen (confined space)

---

unSeen (confined space)
Metro Arts, Professional Development Residency, Brisbane
21 – 27 March 2016
Artists: Sarah Houbolt, Kellie O’Dempsey and Michael Dick

unSeen (confined space) is a project in development filmed at Metro Arts, Brisbane. unSeen is a sensory game of call and response exploring perception and the disparate. Using drawn lines, body gestures, digital projection and sound design, this live gesamtkunstwerk or total artwork starts a feedback loop that informs an unwritten script as the artists unite with each other without utilising  verbal communication. Together they interrogate the public and the private, and what is seen and unseen within a small space.

Photograoher and videographer • Fiarrah Poole 

TAPE on

---

TAPE on: a temporal collision of line

Griffith University Art Museum | Brisbane
24 February 2016
Artists: Vanghoua Anthony Vue and Kellie O’Dempsey

Interactive performance with the possibility of play.

In collaboration with Vanghoua Anthony Vue, TAPE on: a temporal collision of line is an interactive performance work that integrates the gestural and geometric. Informed by traditional drawing methods, O’Dempsey’s performance drawings respond to movement, and the body in an immediate environment. Vue draws on popular culture, street art, the everyday, DIY ethic, and brings aspects of his Hmong heritage into a contemporary art context. Together these two artists will collide in a conversation through line.

Photographer and videographer • Vanghoua Anthony Vue

A Line in the Night

---

Photographer: Anna Hill

A Line in the Night (performance) as a part of Just Draw (exhibition)
Newcastle Art Gallery
6 February – 1 May 2016

Featuring the live drawing performance A Line in the Night, from 8.00pm, Newcastle Art Gallery will become the canvas for artist Kellie O’Dempsey and musician Mick Dick to collaborate and respond to sound and the immediate environment. In a live performance O’Dempsey will use light and colour to create a new digital drawing work.

Just Draw celebrates drawing and its many possibilities, performance, multimedia, installation, sculpture, kinetics and robotics. This exhibition presents Australian artists who leverage the possibilities of this deceptively simple medium.

Australian drawing is alive with dynamic interrogations of its own parameters. It is an enduring medium with a fierce versatility, a medium of democracy, that is easily accessible in both materials and actions.

Drawing offers a conceptual wonderland, allowing the practitioner to meander through a broad spectrum of ideas and concepts. From artists whose work could be described as a contemporary take on a classical methodology, to those who nudge the definition of ‘drawing’ beyond the realm of ‘marks on paper’. This survey considers artists' works which are so much more than just drawing.

Guest curators: Todd Fuller and Lisa Woolfe

Exhibiting Artists: Connie Anthes, Hannah Bertram, John Bokor, Flatline, Todd Fuller, Matilda Michell, Kellie O’Dempsey, Catherine O’Donnell, Hannah Quinlivan, Jack Stahel, Grant Stewart, Jeremy Smith, Jane Theau, Paul White, Lisa Woolfe

With thanks to the support of project partners:
Newcastle Art Gallery, Bathurst Regional Gallery, Faculty and Students of The University of Newcastle School of Creative Arts, Watt Space Gallery, The Backyard Bus Artist Residency, Newcastle Now, Newcastle Council, NAVA National Association of the Visual Arts The Australian Artists’ Grant is a NAVA initiative, made possible through the generous sponsorship of Mrs Janet Holmes à Court and the support of the Visual Arts Board, Australia Council for the Arts.

Links | Newcastle Art Gallery // Exhibition essays

Credits | Photographer: Anna Hill