Kay Le Seelleur Ara has a complicated relationship with religion. Cared for by kind nuns in a convent school from the age of 4 until 11, she has been married for over 60 years to a Spanish Catholic whose piety lacks kindness. Kay’s biblical references often mutate into real life events or draw attention to present day social issues.
At 83 Kay has a vast arsenal of memories and images to draw from, her paintings are filled with deities, goddesses, animals, angels, mothers, carers, officials, priests, kings and hypocrites. These characters are malleable and interchangeable and her childlike enthusiasm to make a picture that is direct and uncompromising has resulted in an extraordinary body of over 400 paintings made since she broke her hip six years ago. Kay cannot walk unaided and now paints everyday; engaging with the world through her paintings.
At school the catholics went for catechism while the non catholics went to the basement for spelling. To this day Kay is an excellent speller and perhaps this is where her love of words came from. Words feature in the paintings themselves as well as form the all important final act, when Kay invests each one with a title. These titles might be painful or mischievous, poignant or funny but they draw us into her world. Duality is a feature of Kay’s work, worshippers might be reaching up to god or performing a fascist salute, god’s spies are hidden under cloaks and the angels are never beautiful but rather broken or anxious. Mermaids are kept alive in jars and the bearded lady is removed from the museum which might also be a reference to Kay’s battle with meta whose bots routinely flag Kay’s paintings because her figures are naked.
Kay’s paintings seem to have a previous and future life - a narrative thread that starts before we arrive and carries on after we have left.