Inherited with Kelly O’Brien and Yuko Edwards

The exhibition at KIT FORM brings together the work of two local artists, Yuko Edwards and Kelly O’Brien. Both artists explore what is valued, inherited and made visible within family histories. Kelly O’Brien’s No Rest for the Wicked explores the cycle of labour endured by poor and working class women across three generations. She uses photography to examine what is passed between generations—not only objects and images, but identities, knowledge, labour and social histories.  She examines the often-unrecognised labour of women and the knowledge passed between generations. Yuko Edwards’ What You See in my Face is a long-look within a blended family and the rupture that happens when a combined family structure then comes apart at the end of a generation. When the restructuring of love, land and stories shifted again along race and class lines, was the family ever really blended? The work describes inherited knowledge and draws heavily from the family’s archive and new pictures that reflect that progression through time and disinheritance. 

Both practices reveal inheritance as something more complex than property or bloodline: it is also a selective and uneven transmission of memory, work, resilience and unequal social value.Together, the projects ask who and what is remembered, what is hidden? What does memory do and when does it count? And, how photography can challenge the structures that determine whose lives, histories and labour are considered valuable.

Kelly O’Brien — No Rest for the Wicked

Kelly O’Brien explores domestic work by intertwining her family’s stories with issues of class, gender, and occupation, advocating for the visibility of working women and their struggles. In her works, the narrative shifts between the tensions of domestic burdens—a shadowed space where gender disparities persist—and the paradox of the home as a sanctuary. No Rest for the Wicked celebrates the home to reveal the invisible labour that underlies it. The project highlights the experiences of women whose work, both inside and outside the home, often goes unrecognised.

Bio

Kelly O’Brien is an artist, researcher, and lecturer based in England. Her Irish immigrant, working class background shapes a multidisciplinary practice spanning image‑making, sculpture, and installation. She explores the politics of in/visibility, using absence to rethink how people, places, and histories are shown and understood. Her work centres on restorative representation, collaboration, and working class feminist perspectives. She focuses on what is often overlooked, treating invisibility not as a lack but as a space for imagination and collective possibility.

Recent exhibitions – The Wellcome Collection (ENG), Two Temple Place (ENG), Fondazione MAST (IT), Sunny Bank Mills (ENG),The ALBERTINA Museum (AUT), and The Women’s Art Collection (ENG) and The Glynn Vivian (WLS). Recent Collection Acquisitions – The Arts Council Collection (UK) and The Vurbund Collection (AUT).

Yuko Edwards — What You See in my Face

What You See in my Face begins with Yuko Edwards’ discovery of historical negatives, prints, postcards and letters in her white stepmother’s family home, recently inherited by her interracial parents. The house becomes a living archive, containing traces of those who have belonged to the family and those yet to come. Edwards uses these materials to question how inheritance shapes identity within blended and mixed-race families, and how family histories exceed the fixed narratives suggested by biology or DNA.

Through reprinting, layering, reframing and annotating archival images, alongside family conversations and the insertion of her own image, voice and material traces, Edwards explores the archive as both evidence and omission. Her work asks where Black presence sits within an inherited visual history, and what happens when previously fragmented narratives are re-read and re-contextualised. Photography becomes not simply a record of the past, but an active space for negotiating memory, belonging, absence and connection.

Bio

Yuko Edwards is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Bristol, England. Whether the work manifests itself as video, photography or mixed media, her art is always an ongoing conversation about place, space, identity, self-identity and how we each live within these frameworks.

Archival material, including found family photographs, are often used as starting points for storytelling and to question existing social structures. Her photographic approach combines documentary with an imaginative and often personal dimension. History is used as a reference point in Edwards’ work to help us understand where we’ve been and where we are going. Since 2018, her work has been shown in festivals and venues in England including Somerset House, M-Shed and the RWA.

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