“I smell smoke, but seen no fire.” - Mary Reid Kelley's short film The Queen's English opens with this sentence. Different shapes that look as if they have been sketched by hand can be seen on the gray area of the screen: dice, bent tubes, triangles. A woman's voice can be heard and shortly afterwards the person speaking becomes visible on the screen: Reid Kelley, the artist herself, wearing bulbous prosthetics with eyes drawn on them, holds a monologue, her head tilted slightly downwards, as if in a cartoon. She is wearing a nurse's cap and a white tunic. In the background you see a scene that could be from a cartoon: drawings of tents, a path leading right through the scene, everything in black-and-white. The setting is the First World War. Reid Kelley is talking about her work as a nurse in a field hospital, something women typically did in those days. “I write their letters for them,” she says about the wounded soldiers. “To speak the Queen's own English takes massive concentration.” Then the scene changes. [...]

Susanne Lux
Translation: Pauline Cumbers


Catalogue excerpt
fast forward 2. The Power of Motion
Media Art Sammlung Goetz
Editors: Ingvild Goetz and Stephan Urbaschek
Ostfildern, Hatje Cantz, 2010

Mary Reid Kelley, Sadie, The Saddest Sadist, 2009
Single-channel video (projection or flat screen), black and white, sound  
Edition 6/6 
7' 23"