Jane Kelly

Jane Kelly (born 7 May 1956) is a journalist and artist, affiliated with the Stuckist art group. She was dismissed from the Daily Mail after exhibiting a painting of serial killer Myra Hindley. Life and work Jane Kelly was born in Charlton, London, and educated at Pendeford High School, Wolverhampton, and Stirling University, where she graduated in 1978 in history and fine art. 1978–79 she taught in Sosnowiec University, Poland, since when she has worked as a journalist, including the Walsall Observer, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, The Guardian and Daily Express. She said: In the 1970s it was Lynda Lee-Potter against Jean Rook on the Daily Express, and we younger women writers all thought we would inherit that. But it's faded out. There's been a change in editorial approach. Perhaps lippy women aren't as much of a draw as they were. In 1995, she took an Advanced Diploma in Painting at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London. In 2000, she exhibited in the Royal Academy Summer Show. The same year, she was a guest artist of the Stuckist art group, and in 2003 founded The Acton Stuckists group. In 2004, she was an exhibitor in The Stuckists Punk Victorian show at the Walker Art Gallery during the 2004 Liverpool Biennial. At the time she was a writer on the Daily Mail, but was dismissed after a painting by her, If We Could Undo Psychosis 2 featuring Myra Hindley, was exhibited in the show. The painting shows a family group of a mother and child with child-killer Myra Hindley substituted for the father and holding a teddy bear. The incident was reported on the front page of The Guardian newspaper, which commented: Stuckism, the art movement founded by Tracey Emin's former boyfriend to oppose the pretensions of Britart, claims to advocate 'honest, uncensored expression'. Unfortunately, the Daily Mail does not appear to share those values. It described how the paper welcomed a previous work exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Show by Kelly showing London Mayor Ken Livingstone in the context of the 1944 Stauffenberg plot against Hitler. The Daily Mail'''s managing editor, Lawrence Sear, who dismissed Kelly, described as "absolute rubbish" the claim that the loss of her job was related to her artwork.