Kelly McCallum shifts position in her chair slightly and says in measured tones “I generally get very strong reactions.”
We’re sitting in Kelly’s studio under an East London railway arch. Our companions include a variety of stuffed creatures from a turtle to a snarling fox’s head and three French bulldogs, the latter all very much alive. Having completed two years of pre-vet/pre-med school in America and studied metalworking at the Royal College of Art in London Kelly now uses her interest in anatomy and physiology to reanimate examples of Victorian taxidermy which she rescues from attics and auction rooms.
A ‘typical’ Kelly piece combines taxidermy and precious metals and breeches the boundaries between jewellery and sculpture. I find myself eyeing/being eyed by a stoat’s head mounted on a metal plaque. Mr Stoat sports an 18 carat gold moustache and a top hat and is the image of the cad who charms all the young ladies at a pre-First World War ball. The effect of the piece is eye catching and disconcerting and helps explain the furore that occurred when Kelly’s work first appeared on design blog Dzine.
Kelly explains the Dzine drama: “I had a huge amount of comment…with a lot of people it’s like they don’t read the information where you say these are antique animals. I had people say I was an animal murderer…that’s funny because I can’t even watch nature shows, I’m so emotional about animals. The idea of hurting or killing an animal is just so repugnant to me.”
One person charmed rather than repelled by Kelly’s menagerie is fashion designer Saloni who just launched her latest collection in London Fashion Week at the Savile Club. In a sort of frocks meet flamingos theme Kelly filled the Club’s fin de siècle interior with a flock of exotic, long-legged birds, a feathered version of the catwalk with the most super of the models all saddled up and flaunting golden muzzles (see above). It was a project that allowed her to emphasise the humorous and narrative aspects of her work, what she describes as the process of “collecting objects that have a history and then intervening in them in a way that describes a story or lets them tell their own stories”.
Kelly traces part of her fascination with natural history back to childhood visits to the home of Norman Elder in Toronto. Elder, Canada’s answer to Indiana Jones, had a house full of animals, live and stuffed, and artifacts brought back from his travels. The serendipity of found objects, whether discovered on her studio’s doorstep or the other side of the world, is a recurring theme in Kelly’s work. A series of cufflinks and brooches resulted from her noticing cicada ‘shells’ hanging in trees in Japan. These outer skins are shed by the insects just before they grow wings – collected by Kelly and covered with a thin layer of metal they become silvery ghosts of the hatched cicadas. The anatomical detail is worthy of a textbook and Kelly shows me a tiny slit in one of the metal skins that marks the place where the cicada climbed out of its old home into a new life.
Right now Kelly is working on an exhibition which will open at 54 Rivington Street on 18th March. It’s a joint exhibition with her friend Katie Commodore who studied with Kelly in America and whose work combines eroticism and wallpaper design – just go and see. I left Kelly and Katie working into the night, watched by Mr Stoat and his companion ‘personalities’, described by Kelly as being like “the man on your shoulder incorporating your experiences and adding to your life”.
A selection of Kelly’s work can be seen at www.kellymccallum.com
Image courtesy of Kelly McCallum
