American conceptual artist Mary Kelly discusses how feminism informed her seminal work Post-Partum Document 1973-79 and the origins of her lint technique.

Mary Kelly arrived in London as a student at a time when the public began to protest contentious political issues like gender equality and the Vietnam War. She became involved in the early women’s liberation movement throughout the 1970s and went on to lead the way for representations of women in the arts.

Feminist theory, political discourse and education have remained a constant theme in her work throughout her career. Her work Post-Partum Document 1973-79 draws on contemporary feminist thought and psychoanalysis to explore the roles of woman artists as both creative and procreative.

More recently, Kelly has developed a process where she creates various sizes of prints cast from units of lint, the textile fibres that separate in a domestic dryer. Fashioned over several months and hundreds of washing cycles, the panels of image and text are then assembled and pressed in intaglio.

Mary Kelly is Professor of Art at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she is Head of Interdisciplinary Studio.

Also, here is Mary Kelly in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist.

As part of the curated conversation programme On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Period of Time, Mary Kelly talks to curator, critic, art historian and prolific writer Hans Ulrich Obrist as they explore what defines an era.