Mary Reid Kelley (born 1979) and Patrick Kelley (born 1969) work in collaboration to create video works that combine painting, performance and poetic verse to reinterpret historical and mythological characters.
In Let’s Hear It for Spirits / When I Was the Muse, the artists portray Emma Hamilton (1765–1815) and Horatio Nelson (1758–1805). Displayed in Room 17 on either side of an enfilade through which historical painted portraits of the pair can be seen, the two-channel video diptych shows the characters engaged in a synchronized lovers’ ‘discourse’; they never speak directly, but only communicate through impassioned monologues. The piece is peppered with wordplay, puns and a sense of over-arching rhythm that combines jumps in viewpoint, social comedy and lament, marking the eccentricities and woes of Hamilton and Nelson as individuals and lovers. The two characters are both performed by Mary Reid Kelley in costume and makeup devised by the artists, along with the sets and script.
Nelson’s victories during the wars with France gripped the popular imagination, making him one of the most enduring of British heroes and the subject of numerous monuments and paintings, such as Sir William Beechey’s portrait, shown in Room 18. Benjamin West’s The Immortality of Nelson (exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1807) was turned into an engraving by Charles Theodosius Heath that appeared as the frontispiece in the first of many biographies about Nelson and embodied the cult of hero-worship that followed the naval commander’s death.
Nelson’s strategic brilliance had been confirmed at the Battle of Cape St Vincent (1797) and the Battle of the Nile (1798). This was followed by great controversy when in the throes of passion for Emma Hamilton, he refused to leave Naples to defend Minorca.
In one half of Reid Kelley and Kelley’s diptych, Nelson’s heroic aura is reappraised. Mary Reid Kelley performs him after the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, moments before his death, when military greatness and passionate love merge into one. Human emotions are articulated as they move towards the edge of desperation, fragile optimism and pure slapstick.
Hamilton (1765–1815) achieved celebrity through her beauty, personal vitality and skills as a performer. She came to be principally remembered as an artist’s muse, particularly to George Romney who painted her more than 60 times, and for her love affair with Nelson.
Hamilton fell in love with Nelson after the Battle of the Nile (1798), when she and her husband Sir William Hamilton, the British Ambassador at Naples, offered the wounded officer hospitality. The affair was an international scandal, as the caricatures of James Gillray reflect, but it enhanced Nelson’s reputation as a romantic hero, while it cast Hamilton into a negative light.
In the diptych, Hamilton’s agency is restored, as Mary Reid Kelley embodies her performing the roles of Persephone, The Maenad, Athena, The Sybil and Mary Magdelene, inspired by Hamilton’s famous series of dramatic, moving tableaux vivants known as ‘The Attitudes’, while also lamenting the loss of Nelson. The characters were selected by the artists for the parallels between their stories and Hamilton’s biography.