Cows dominate artist John Kelly's work, ever since an anecdote about papier-mâché cows tickled his funny bone - and his imagination, writes Brian O'Connell
I'm standing on a hillside in west Cork. Beside me two cows look like they're trying to mate. I try not to stare. Ten metres away a bright-red kangaroo is doing the staring for me. Farther up the lawn, cows and kangaroos laze about, soaking up the spring sunshine. Some strike athletic poses. Others just watch. One has made it on to the roof. Many others attempt to climb the walls. From the corner of my eye I spot an upside-down cow up a tree. Through the window of a cottage I can just make out a zebra against the far wall. At least I think it's a zebra.
Okay. Enough. I'll stop. These aren't real animals, and I'm not on acid. But what an introduction to the world of John Kelly, who has been putting cows up trees and art up people's noses for the best part of a decade. He is idolised by fellow artists in his native Australia, and Sotheby's has just auctioned one of his sculptures for €300,000. Yet Kelly has lived in Ireland for the past four years in relative anonymity.
That could all change in May, when the Fenton Gallery, in Cork, hosts his first Irish exhibition, after which he takes his art to Glastonbury Festival, where it has attracted a cult following. And to think it all started via the back of a milk carton.
"I was interested in art from an early age, and had been accepted into art school, but my mother came to me and said they couldn't afford to send me. There were four other kids in the family in school, and we weren't wealthy. I tried to get a job, but this was the early 1980s, and Australia was in recession. I applied for a job in Kentucky Fried Chicken and got knocked back - that's how bad things were.
"But what my mother didn't tell was that she'd entered me in a win-a-wish competition, run on the back of milk cartons. We didn't have a phone, so she put down our neighbours' number, and they came across one day, saying a radio station was on the phone, looking for me. I'd won the competition, and that got me into art school at RMIT University. I was 17 at the time."
From those humble beginnings Kelly has achieved great things. In 1999 he gained international recognition, including the front page of the French newspaper Libération and plaudits in Time magazine, thanks largely to placing a cow up a tree on the Champs-Élysées. The cows, with their elongated necks and disproportionate bodies, have been a theme of his work.
"The story about the cows and the narrative that informs them begins in 1943. A very important Australian painter named William Dobell had a job as a camouflage labourer on grass airstrips. Basically the job involved making papier-mâché cows and putting them on airstrips in the belief that it would disguise the airfields from Japanese airmen. It was a crazy scheme whereby they thought that they could actually hide a whole airfield with some papier-mâché cows. I guess the story appealed to my sense of humour, and my body of work entitled Dobell's Cows developed from there."
But why did Kelly put his papier-mâché cows up trees, upside down? "The cow anecdotes left a lot of room to the imagination. The cow-up-a-tree series comes from another history in Australia, where rapid floods are common, and waters rise and drop very quickly. I had seen pictures of cattle caught in trees. So I began to imagine what would happen if a rapid flood hit the airfield, resulting in fake cows up real or fake trees. The series began from there."
Some years ago, having lived in England and France as well as Australia, Kelly came with his wife and their newborn son to Ireland, settling in the artists' sanctuary of west Cork. His father had emigrated from Mallow in the 1950s, so he always felt drawn to Irish life, he says.
Kelly's outdoor art has become a fixture on the streets of many cities, including his native Melbourne, London and The Hague. Yet, despite offers, Ireland has been slow to embrace Kelly and his work.
"I see similarities in Ireland as to where parts of Australia were 10 years ago," he says. "Specifically I'm thinking in terms of docklands development. The docklands in Melbourne remind me of the dockland developments in Dublin and Cork. Arts have a key role to play in those developments. In Melbourne public-art support has been phenomenal. You can't walk around without bumping into a piece of sculpture. I think in Ireland we see a lot of roundabout art.
"By that I mean those little pieces that whizz by you when you are driving, and don't tend to hold your attention. I'm more interested in substantial and monumental works which are integrated into a city."
Kelly believes that we still need to decide what role the arts should play in urban redevelopment - and that artists should be wary of forming too cosy a relationship. "My concern would be that art is becoming very much used by urban planners but not in a way that's healthy for art or artists. Art can sometimes become a decorative add-on and just part of an overall design concept, usually held in the hands of pretty conservative people. If we're not conscious of it we can end up with pretty conservative work."
There Was an Australian, an Englishman and an Irishman . . . by John Kelly, opens at the Fenton Gallery, Cork, on May 18th