Aussie artist's gesture for the Cork medics who saved his life
John Kelly and his wife Christina at the Famine memorial at their home in Reen.
Nicholas Cummins, a Justice of the Peace from Annmount in Cork City, penned a letter to the Duke of Wellington in the winter of 1846 to try to raise awareness of the horrors the potato famine was wreaking in West Cork. "It is situated on the eastern side of Castlehaven Harbour, and is named South Reen," Cummins writes of a village of 200 people that he had visited, before describing scenes that make for painful reading to this day: corpses eaten by vermin, mothers without the strength to bury their children's bodies.
The artist John Kelly now lives at the scene of these horrors: he bought a cottage and 13 acres in Reen in 2003, on a rugged headland where the village of South Reen once stood.
"When Bob Geldof visited, he talked about the absence here," Kelly says. "He was saying that what was missing was the people. And that makes me wonder about how many poets and writers, from the great Irish literary tradition, disappeared because of An Gorta Mor. I'd like to add a lot more text-based work here."
Kelly is giving a virtual Zoom tour of the large commemorative garden, which will serve as a monument in memory of the famine, that he started working on during his bouts of hospitalisation for a mysterious and life-threatening illness over the past two years.
The Think and Thank garden, named for the family motto of sugar tycoon and art collector Henry Tate, is a vast work, at times reminiscent of a neolithic passage grave, but with sculptural elements: a glasshouse scale replica of the Tate Modern houses a floor slab inscribed with Nicholas Cummin's letter, and a Quaker famine pot that Kelly found in his front garden. The connection between Tate and the famine may not be evident, but Kelly, whose work so frequently revolves around his keen awareness of history and his critical stance on norms within the art world, has woven threads between the two.
"At the same time that An Gorta Mor was raging, Henry Tate owned six greengrocery shops in Liverpool," Kelly says. "He sold them to buy the patent for the sugar cube, which made him a very rich man and he began collecting art. There was no fine art depicting the famine, in fact it was actively discouraged. As an artist, I've connected those histories together to create the Think and Thank garden." Kelly designed his Think and Thank garden in his hospital bed, with the help of his wife Christina, to keep him sane during his lengthy and convoluted recovery from an extremely rare form of vasculitis of the brain that nearly claimed his life.
In 2018, following a year of flu-like symptoms he couldn't shake, Kelly collapsed one night and started having seizures. What followed is, to the artist, a blur, but during his ambulance journey to Cork University Hospital (CUH), he certainly nearly died: the ambulance stopped in Clonakilty, where Dr Jason van der Velde from the West Cork Rapid Response administered an injection that kept him alive until the ambulance reached CUH.
An initial hospital stay of 45 days saw Kelly stabilised, but still subject to mysterious bouts of resurgence; diagnosing his extremely rare condition and finding the right course of treatment was a battle that took over a year. "I kept coming back in to the hospital so much that the staff nicknamed me The Boomerang," he says with a laugh. "I'd be fine for weeks, and then one day I'd get out of the car and start staggering. My consultant finally got in touch with an American specialist who had only ever seen 11 cases like this in the world, and he suggested changing my medication. And they did, and I walked out of hospital a couple of weeks later.
Now, Kelly is working again: he has plans to continue adding to the Think and Thank garden and he's painting, although he says there are some paintings from the period of his illness that are now "too painful" to look back on. "I'm still recovering," he says. "You hear those words so often these days, but I have an underlying condition. Now, it's about living within the parameters of what you can do. It's been a hell of a journey, but I'm here."
* John Kelly's painting, Castlehaven, is being auctioned by Sotheby's, proceeds to the Cork University Hospital Charity and West Cork Rapid Response, on the 9th of September; guide price £5,000-£7,000 GBP https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2020/irish-art/john-kelly-castlehaven
