Artist Talk - Caretaker by Kellie O'Dempsey

Join artist Kellie O’Dempsey for an intimate conversation inside Caretaker, her cinematic and immersive installation exploring memory, mortality and the often-invisible labour of care. Surrounded by projection and Michael Dick’s eerie sound composition, Kellie will share the personal experiences and ideas that shaped the work — from caring for a dying parent to becoming a caretaker of memories, objects and the traces of a life.

With only 15 places available, this is a rare opportunity to spend time with the artist inside the work, ask questions and delve more deeply into the themes, stories and processes behind Caretaker.

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.