John Kelly, Cow Up a Tree

Laser cut steel
€175

In appreciation of the work of West Cork Rapid Response Unit and CUH, John Kelly is donating 60% of each sale of his metal drawing Cow Up A Tree

In the background is:
John Kelly
Pidgeons in Flight
Bronze
€7,000

In appreciation of the work of West Cork Rapid Response Unit and CUH, John Kelly is donating 60% of the sale of this piece from our Annual Members and Friends Exhibition Pidgeons in Flight.

Pidgeons in Flight is available to purchase direct from the gallery.

In August 2018, unexpectedly, I was admitted to a Cork University Hospital (CUH) art residency. I arrived by train. It was a frustrating trip, for it continually went around in circles, stopping and starting. Unlike most art residencies, I had a bed and staff were on call to wait on me. On the train I, unsuccessfully, tried to buy a pair of boots to cover the bare feet at the end of the bed. From this bed I noticed three people with their backs to me at a nearby desk. I sleep. I am awoken by rapid gun fire and cower; am I about to die? A large man with a scar on his neck hovers over me, with his soft voice he whispers, “You are safe John”. I sleep.

I am awoken by a man in green glasses with a beard. He asks, John do you know where you are? I don’t know. I sleep. My machine wakes me, its beeping annoyingly consistent. The room becomes animated when the beep, behind the curtain, loses its consistency. The room is calm again as it’s beeping returns it to normal. I begin to levitate and my view pixelates into blue. I Sleep.

Is this a nightmare, have I had an accident? No, it is an alternative world, akin to Flann O’Brien’s novel, The Third Policeman or Kubrick’s, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It is a brief description of what turned from days to weeks and then months on 3A, the Neurology Ward in CUH.

In retrospect, it makes perfect sense; my brain interpreting its surroundings whilst in an ambulance, then a coma. The train? The bed being wheeled around the corridors for scans and changing of wards and rooms from the Intensive Care Unit to Room 11 on 3A, the high dependency room. The levitation was not an out of body experience but the bed being raised and lowered by a nurse; the blue pixels, the colour of the bed cover, seen through the eyes of a heavily drugged patient. The gunfire became a familiar sound in the MRI scans, the hallucinations the result of the plethora of drugs needed to bring me back from the abyss.

The long days that followed admission turned into weeks, then months. A brain biopsy, meeting Bob Geldof and all before finally being discharged. Upon leaving my CUH ‘Art Residency’, I took home the sketchbooks in which I would draw day and night with a shaky hand to while away the boredom of being ill. At night, I drew strange looking self-portraits as the windows turned into reflective mirrors.

As the months passed, I moved down the corridor, room by room, each time getting closer to the doors that I was originally forbidden to pass. In late April 2019 I walked through those doors.

When I left, I took home a wingless ‘pigeon’, a name used in CUH for the cardboard urine receptacles for male patients who are bedridden. These were a step up and preferential to the painful catheter and the plastic bag that glowed a bright yellow at end of the bed, when in the high dependency room. A place where one’s dignity is lost.

Soon after returning home I made the bronze cast of the three ‘Pigeons’ that now dignify the Uillinn walls. They reference Duchamp’s 1917 Fountain, which consisted of a ‘Urinal’ and announced the arrival of DADA in modern art. One might think I am taking the piss with this work, a 2021 DADA work, but I am not. It is simply acknowledging an extraordinary experience whilst recognising the doctors who helped me emerge from that Cuckoo’s nest, to make an artwork which has a very personal meaning, coming as it does from the depths of despair.

The three ‘Pigeons’ are named after three doctors who were on call the day I most needed them. They are; Matt, Jason and Stela, The Flying Doctors of County Cork. (Dr. Matt Dahm, Dr. Jason van de Velde and Dr. Stela Lefter) John Kelly, May 2021