Onward Onwards: An exhibition by Kay Le Seelleur Ara

Back by popular demand, Kay Le Seelleur Ara returns to CCA Galleries International with Onward Onwards – a wild, witty and wonderfully unruly new body of work.

Kay Le Seelleur Ara has never made work that sits still.

Since a fall in 2017 left her unable to walk unaided, Kay has drawn from her armchair and painted in a small studio in her Trinity home, producing a relentless, riotous outpouring of work. Figures – human, animal and somewhere in between – jostle across the canvas with the wit, mischief and dark undertow that have made her one of Jersey’s most vital contemporary artists.

Onward Onwards takes its title from Kay’s own outlook: a lifelong refusal to stop, to soften, or to be anything other than exactly herself, on the page and off it.

Kay is currently living with delirium and is being cared for in a residential setting. She will not see this exhibition in person. When asked what she wanted her life to look like, she pointed to Yayoi Kusama – an artist whose decades living in an institution never once stood in the way of the work, or the world’s appetite for it.

Kay wanted this show to happen regardless. So, it has.

The exhibition brings together new work made with the same restless, magpie sensibility that has carried Kay from her first solo exhibition at age 82 to international collectors and a devoted following around the world. Images are pulled from everywhere – popular culture, art history, memory, observation and imagination – and filtered through nobody but her.

There is no neat category for Kay’s work, and no fixed point of view. Her paintings are funny, unsettling, tender, bawdy and strange. They refuse to behave. They move at their own pace, accumulating characters, references and possibilities until the canvas seems barely able to contain them.

Onward Onwards is an exhibition about continuing: about making work in the face of limitation, about an imagination that refuses to be contained, and about an artist who has never been particularly interested in standing still.