Fiona Kelly (b. 1985)Folly

Fiona Kelly’s Folly is an artwork which examines questions surrounding the human ‘exploration’ of landscape, understood as both a relationship with nature and an extractivist approach to natural resources. The world’s debris manifests in the guise of material arrangements, by-products of the urban landscape, which incorporate plywood, reconstituted waste and scaffold like structures. Like much of Kelly’s work, Folly speaks of the rapid change that has happened in Ireland since the late 1990s, in which the environment has become endangered through major infrastructure developments. 

Folly is also part of a series of 4 different prints that Kelly produced in 2012 entitled Follies. These works were shown in the Glucksman exhibitions I Went to the Woods: The artist as wanderer (2016) and Double Take: Collections and Context (2018) and were acquired as part of the University College Cork Art Collection in 2017.