The Faraway Nearby
Phoebe Kelly

Phoebe Kelly’s The Faraway Nearby is a body of image-based works that explores the metaphor of the net as a container for the retrieval of memory. The work draws from the Gaelic myth of Manannán mac Lir (‘son of the Sea’), which tells of a Celtic water deity who gathered his treasures – including written language – in nets that filled and emptied with the tide. Created using analogue processes of lumen, argyrotype and darkroom c-type printing, a personal archive of digital and analogue images are metabolised through chemical transformation into forms held within a series of ghostly nets. What was once fixed becomes porous, as layers of time and place overlap in fragments that, like memory itself, synthesise into unsettled spaces of possibility. 

About the artist 

Phoebe Kelly is a visual artist living and working in Naarm (Melbourne). Her practice employs photographic archives and analogue photographic processes to explore our relationship to the image and its construction. Through her work, she thinks through forms of memory, time and translation – particularly as these might be explored through the photographic. Phoebe graduated with an Honours degree in Visual Art from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2019, and has since exhibited within Melbourne and nationally, including being a recipient of an Ian Potter Trust Grant for Visual Arts in 2025.

Banner image : The Faraway Nearby, Phoebe Kelly, 2026, Hand-printed photogram and Argyrotype, 65cm x 65cm.