Mike Kelly

My work begins with walking — and riding - the landscape of the Pennines, something I’ve been doing for more than forty years, on trails and tracks that predate the maps that record them.

Photography gives me licence to look at what I already knew differently — bringing critical thinking to bear on terrain I have long explored. I’ve come to realise that this is not really about research, but accumulated knowledge of many seasons of trails and tracks carried in the body.

I’m drawn to gaps in understanding. When viewers argue about whether an image shows a chimney or a water tower, it leaves me intrigued. That rapid loss of meaning, within a single lifespan, is what the work is fundamentally about. The churn of human striving - the labour, the resistance, the grand building projects and the inevitable fading away - happens faster than we imagine. The landscape tolerates as best it can, adjusts and moves on.

Often, the work extends the single photograph into constructed and experimental forms: layered surfaces, accumulated data, testimony and image occupying the same physical space.

The question underneath my work is what remains, and for how long, and whether it matters that we can no longer say what things once were.

Showing now:

Three images were selected as prize winners for Bury Art Museum’s OPEN 2025 exhibition.

The work is on display through to 21st February 2026