Conor Kelly is an artist, lecturer and emergent researcher. He is currently Programme Leader and Lecturer on the International Foundation programme at the Glasgow School of Art. He previously led the postgraduate elective ‘Drawing as Research’, a practice-led cross-disciplinary course exploring drawing as a system of thinking and tool for research. His research spans a range of practices within contemporary fine art (including painting, sculpture, installation art, text and the moving image) and explores encounters with the natural world and how the constituent agents and sites of these encounters are traced through the natural sciences and material culture.

Current research interests include human/animal encounters, the exploration of the animal as metaphor, the ‘anthropomorphic embrace’ within contemporary fine art practice and notions of alterity in the representation of animal and plant lives.

Previous projects have explored the disruption of dominant representational systems and themes of alterity through fine art painting, sculpture and installation art. Public exhibitions (including 'The Hrönir (Jerks, Buffoons & Pests)' (2019) Platform Arts Belfast and 'Daddy in the Algorithm' (2017) Queens Park Railway Club) have threaded human and animal stories to create temporary environments that embraced a delay or upending of the ’grid of identities, similitudes, and analogies‘ (Foucault 1994) to which our material culture is accustomed. Methodologies included the development of painting installations that explored and questioned the extent of the agencies claimed by WJT Mitchell in ‘What Do Pictures Want?’ (2005) (ie: the ‘vital signs’ in pictures; ‘agency, motivation, autonomy, aura, fecundity’ of images, ‘not merely signs for living things but signs as living things’) and critic Isabelle Graw’s assertion that painting functions as a ‘thinking subject’ in 'Thinking Through Painting: Reflexivity and Agency Beyond the Canvas' (2012).

Conor has exhibited his work nationally and internationally, including; The Hrönir (Jerks, Buffoons & Pests), Platform Arts, Belfast (2019); Glasshouse, Glasgow Botanic Gardens, Glasgow International Festival (2018) (group exhibition); Pithecia Pithecia Pithecia Pithecia HilbertRaum, Berlin (2017); Daddy In The Algorithm, Queens Park Railway Club, Glasgow (2017); Culte Cargo (with Kari Stewart) Voidoid Archive, Glasgow (2016) (2-person exhibition); Do U Feel Like We Do? Intermedia CCA, Glasgow (2014); True Places Never Are, Youghal, Cork (2014) (group exhibition); Cryptids, Glasgow Project Room (with Liam Allan, Amelia Bywater, Luke Collins, Nick Evans and Shireen Taylor) (2014)(curator); Things go Dark (group exhibition with Fiona Burke, Michael Canning, David Godbold, Conor Kelly, Elizabeth Magill, Eoin McHugh, Stephen McKenna, Alison Pilkington & Jennifer Trouton) The Model, Sligo (2014); Pentimentos and Soda, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh (2013); Golden Years, Glasgow Project Room (2012); The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World, SWG3, Glasgow (with Mark Briggs and Jim Colquhoun) (2012); Lampara Descomunal, Kunstverein Arnsberg (2011); Haunt, The Old Hairdressers, Glasgow (group exhibition) (2011); Overseas – Jahresgaben 2011, Kunstverein Arnsberg (group exhibition) (2011) SAM DEROUNIAN ALEX IMPEY FLORRIE JAMES CONOR KELLY GRAHAM KELLY KARI ROBERTSON TESSA LYNCH CHARLOTTE PRODGER MICHAEL SMITH, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow (group exhibition) (2011); Exeter Contemporary Open 2011, Exeter Phoenix Gallery, Exeter (2011); Turn It On Again, SWG3 Projects, Glasgow International Festival (3-person exhibition with Niall MacDonald and Emmett Walsh) (2010); Saltwater, The Tall Ship, Glasgow Harbour, Glasgow International Festival (group exhibition) (2010); Say What What Way, Shopat34 Artist-run-space, London (2010); Open West 2010, Summerfield Gallery, University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham (group exhibition) (2010); Posthumous Hummus, A.Vermin, Glasgow (3-person exhibition) (2010); Arts Council of Northern Ireland - Recent Acquisitions, The Braid Mid-Antrim Museum, Ballymena, Northern Ireland (2009); The Revolutionary Haircut, Glasgow Project Room (2009), How to Manage When Everything is a Priority, The Grace and Clark Fyfe Gallery, Glasgow School of Art (group exhibition) (2009).

Keywords: Painting, Sculpture, Installation Art, Philosophy, Critical Theory, Anthropology, Anthrozoology, Ethology