Caretaker, Kellie O'Dempsey

Cinematic and unexpected, Caretaker is an immersive installation combining both existing and new works of projection, collage, sound and performance. Caretaker gives visual form to the memory and experience. Here the invisible labour of women and the in-between space between dying and death are materialised. In caring for someone exiting this life, Kellie O'Dempsey felt like a caretaker of memories, of the objects, cupboards, boxes, antiquities and personal effects, wherein these memories are infused. Familiar, vintage objects become vessels of embedded life, story and memory, carrying traces of the hands that once held them. These objects become vestiges for the complex fragility, intimacy, exhaustion and boredom of this temporal space, when one is confronted with their own mortality via the death of a parent. Drawing on installation, performance and video, O'Dempsey ritualises care and nurtures relationality to acknowledge women's unseen labour and question the value of care in a society that values capital. Sound composer Michael Dick's score is captivating and eerie, drawing the audience deeper into the work's strange atmosphere.

Caretaker invites audiences to walk into a strange yet familiar time and space. A tender, temporal space where mortality, memory mingle through the echoes of a carer's presence appear as spectres embedded in the site.

The work honours women's unseen labour and queries the value of care in a capital-driven world, acknowledging that the spaces we inhabit have always been cared for by the ancestors who came before us.

Sound Michael Dick

Videography Jorge Serra

Kellie O’Dempsey builds worlds, alternative realities where time refuses to be measured or contained. Working across installation, performance, and video, Kellie employs the loop as structure and philosophical motif for the ungraspable nature of consciousness and time: recursive, never identical, always becoming. Through site-responsive installation, Kellie makes tangible the impossible present as fugitive and often absurd encounters.

Drawn to post-human feminism, Kellie’s work considers the unrecognised durations of care, experience and labour that capitalist time refuses to count. Grief and loss, personal and ecological, converge as a conceptual threshold. The work is never object but event — something the viewer must enter, feel and inhabit.

With an expansive and multidisciplinary approach and as a mid-career artist Kellie builds installations where architecture dissolves into projection, drawing merges into sound, and time becomes visible through temporal layers. Using experimental practices, the works excavate the uncanny within everyday spaces, revealing the hidden and the strange.

For over two decades, Kellie has employed performance and projection across major Australian venues including The National Gallery of Australia, MONA FOMA and the Museum of Brisbane.
Based on Kabi Kabi Country (Sunshine Coast) and represented by Jan Manton Gallery, Kellie merges large-scale projection, video, collage and sound into environments that transform and re-imagine space through movement and colour.