MUSIC: I Love Your Existence (X:XX)

SUPER: Post-Partum Document, 1973-1979

Installation, Anna Leonowens Gallery, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1981

VO: Kelly's political work became personal with her first major work, Post-Partum Document. Post-Partum Document is a multi-media exhibition chronicling the growth of the artist's son as seen by Kelly through the lens of psychoanalytic theory.

VO: Post-Partum Document contained six parts. Each part had a large number of framed specimens on the wall as well as an accompanying text that both explained and complicated the exhibit

SUPER: Post-Partum Document, Introduction

VO: The introduction contained 4 of her son's baby vests with drawings and text.

SUPER:
Post-Partum Document, Documentation I
Analysed faecal stains and feeding chart

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VO: The second part of Post-Partum Document  contains used diapers, or nappies as they are called in England, in plastic cases, one for each day of her son's 4th to 6th month.
Each is printed with text listing the time and type of feedings, and the amount the child lost through excreting, which she also rated on a scale.

VO: These now infamous "nappies" caused a scandal in the media when it was first exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in 1976.

SUPER: "Dirty Nappies" Article, London Evening Standard, 1976

SUPER:
Post-Partum Document, Documentation II
Analysed utterances and related speech events

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VO: Documentation II documents her son's beginning efforts at language. Kelly focuses on language a lot in Post-Partum Document, as well as in much of her later work, because she sees language as constructing both our conscious and unconscious minds.

VO: The accompanying text to this section explains in psychoanalytic terms the way language is acquired, as well as discussing how during this phase in the child's development they are learning to move beyond single words and to form sentences

SUPER:
Post-Partum Document , Documentation III
Analysed markings and diary-perspective schema

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VO: Documentation III contained framed drawings made by her son, overlaid with transcriptions of his speech, and Kelly's thoughts about what he said and the situation at the time

SUPER:
Post-Partum Document , Documentation IV
Transitional objects, diary and diagram

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VO: Kelly's writing in these pieces is diary-like, and show her many anxieties over whether she is doing a good job as a mother. By including her own feelings, Kelly is making herself, the mother, the subject of the artworks, a role mothers have rarely had in art.

VO: "I didn't see K much this week because of the Brighton show. Now I've noticed he's started stuttering. Dr Spock says it's due to 'mother's tenseness or father's discipline.' My work has been undermined by th appearance of this symptom because I realize it depends on belief in what I'm doing as a mother… as well as an artist. I feel I can't carry on with it."

SUPER:
Post-Partum Document, Documentation V
Classified specimens, proportional diagrams, statistical tables, research and index

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SUPER:
Post-Partum Document, Documentation VI,
Prewriting Alphabet Exerque and Diary

VO: This final section of slate tablets inscribed with her son's attempts at writing and Kelly's diary entries imitates the famous Rosetta stone tablet.

VO: A major component of Post-Partum Document is the development of the child's sexuality, and this section documents the stage in the child's development when he or she begins asking questions about anatomy and the different roles of men and women

SUPER: View from the couch in Sigmund Freud's treatment room

SUPER: Freud's collection of objects

VO: A compendium of relics and texts, Post-Partum Document directly references Sigmund Freud's activities of collecting and displaying antiquities and other objects. Post-Partum Document is a resistance, however, to the misogynist treatment of women in the psychoanalytic tradition. In Post-Partum Document, Kelly presents the various objects gathered from her son's childhood as possible fetish objects, intended to take the place of her child as he became more and more independent.

VO: Kelly never depicts herself in Post-Partum Document, nor in any of her other artworks, because she wants the viewer to construct their own sense of her through her writing, rather than by objectifying her image. For Kelly, any use of the female body is problematic and unlikely to successfully depict woman as subject, because the image of woman has been overdetermined in western visual art.

SUPER: Kelly and her son in the recording studio

VO: Kelly does give us this one image of herself and her son, but it appears in the book form of Post-Partum Document, which was published in 1983.

VO: Kelly's main point with Post-Partum Document is that if it is only women who are the main caregivers of children, then children's psyches develop to see their mother in a particular way. This has led to the idea that men represent the role of law and order in the family. Freud assumed this was because men possess an anatomical part that women do not. Kelly, however, asserts that it is the division of labor in the family that is at the root of inequity between the sexes.