Launch: Saturday 2nd May – 1pm

Dates: 2nd May – 20th January 2026

Gallery: Upper Gallery

Sharon Kelly’s practice mediates between memory, experience and imagination, working across 2 and 3D processes, including drawing, painting, print, sculpture and installation. Her work is concerned with the body; with marking and mapping the physical and psychological, exploring themes of fragility, resilience, liminality and transformation. Inspirations come from diverse sources such as anatomy, medicine, dressmaking and sport.

In this new body of work, presented at Golden Thread Gallery,  Kelly reflects on what remains hidden or unnoticed and how such absences shape our sense of identity and connection to the world around us. Through the use of worn clothing, vintage sewing patterns, and other delicate materials, Kelly delves into the emotional complexities of concealment and burden, uncovering traces of past lives and contemplating what is missing or left unfulfilled. Pockets become quiet repositories, holding secrets, forgotten memories, or unseen places offering a space where the precious and the heavy coexist. In this excavation of personal history, Kelly explores themes of intimacy, emotional weight, and inherited burden, particularly through the lens of female experience.

Artist Statement

“Disposal of Fullness, the exhibition title and the phrase around which ideas for the work evolved. The term references a process in dressmaking of easing or gathering in fabric as a way of adjusting, shaping or reducing garments.

I have been interested in sewing processes since a teenager in the 1970s, when dressmaking was still on the school curriculum. Over recent years, sewing has emerged in my practice both through imagery and the construction processes, as I have developed sculptural pieces exploring ideas of fragility and resilience, female experience, modes of control and constraint.

Ideas embedded in the work relate to women’s lives that have so often been ‘put on hold’ or embedded in someone else’s story. The work also speaks to circumstances where life has taken its own path; where traces of experience remain; where plans may have been imagined but never realised, or remain unfinished, unfulfilled. It reflects and centres on the constraints and forces on women’s’ lives and offers a celebration the resilience of women as a counter to the culture of violence against women.”

About the Artist

In 2023 Kelly was awarded the Arts Council of Northern Ireland Major Individual Award, in recognition of her contribution to the arts. Recent work has been supported by The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, New York, USA, 2022 and in 2023 she completed a fellowship at the British School at Rome, Italy. Kelly is a Studio artist at Queen Street Studios Belfast.

Accessibility 

The Upper Gallery is accessed via the ground floor and lift, which is step-free.

Large print versions of exhibition texts are available.

Access videos of the gallery are available on our website here, with BSL and ISL signed versions.

Please let us know if you have any questions or additional requirements, we are working hard to make the gallery as accessible as possible for everyone.

Golden Thread Gallery is proud to hold an Arts & Disability Access Award 2025 Venue Accreditation. 

Golden Thread Gallery is supported by: