About - Mike A Kelly

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.

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Previous Exhibitions:

2026

Darkness Symposium - MMU School of Digital Arts

2025

Bury Art Museum OPEN — Cass Art Exhibition Award winner, three works selected, Bury Art Museum

Gunpowder Tea (collaborative work) — IAAC Poetry Film Festival, New York

Gunpowder Tea (collaborative work) — South Asian Poetry Film Festival, Chicago

Swanfall: Fables — 3 works selected from open call, Mall Galleries, London

SODA x Montag Residency Showcase — Istanbul

Keep Pushing — Circle Square installation, Manchester

Unconformities — Viewpoints Festival, Manchester

Prosperity Through Endeavour — Rossendale

Calico Works — Dark Peak Photography

2024

Gunpowder Tea (collaborative with with MMU MA Students, poet Shadab Zeest Hashmi and Imperial War Museum, in response to the work of Chila Kumari Burman) — Imperial War Museum North

2012

Remix // — Manchester Photographic Gallery

2010

Lagos Street Scene — Fela! production, Broadway & National Theatre

Willie Nelson portrait (with Malcolm Bucknall) — W Hotel, Austin

Upcoming Exhibitions

Threshold

Threshold

MMU MA Show 2026

Previous Exhibitions:

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