Artbank Staff Profile: Kelly Fliedner

Name: Kelly Fliedner

Job Title: Collections Officer and Art Consultant

What year did you join the Artbank team: 2022

Describe your role and what you enjoy about working for Artbank:

I’m the only Artbank staff member based in Western Australia so my role is incredibly broad. It encompasses client services, registration, curatorial and administrative work as well envisioning how Artbank might grow and expand here in the future. On any given day I might be meeting someone to discuss how the Artbank collection might enrich their office or home; managing the care and movement of artworks; or, visiting a gallery to see exhibitions, meet artists and gallerists. It’s exciting and fun and meaningful work.

I’ve long known about and respected the work of Artbank and its capacity to both support the contemporary art industry of Australia while making contemporary art tangible and accessible to the general public. In my short time with Artbank I’ve been blown away at the quality, depth and diversity of the collection, which really does reflect the breadth of Australian art. I feel incredibly proud to be part of the team.

                      

Select an Artwork to represent you: Peter Tyndall, detail/A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/someone looks at something..., 1988, 

Short explanation of your artwork selection:

Peter Tyndall’s work is always about looking at art, about how art educates and guides us, and how it reflects and binds us. His work is a critique of the system of art, its limitations and its potentials distilled into lines and symbols. A simple square box with two attached lines represents one hanging frame. Read together in multiplicity these frames represent a collection and the broader art world — all its networks, all its relations.

In this particular series we see a grid of yellow suspended frames contrasted with block prints of medieval-like figures and script. Taken together this clash of contemporary and historical timelines and contexts might be a comment upon the circularity of power or the inevitability of narratives retold and relived, or how art objects and history communicate with each other. But in them I see the expansiveness of art — the depiction of the frame not as a mode of containment but as a portal.