Kelvin Mann

Kelvin was born in Dunedin in 1972 and educated at the Otago School of Fine Art - a pupil of artist Barry Cleavin. In 1994 he received a New Zealand Art Council grant to form a print studio, while he also worked as an animation artist at Vidmark Television in Dunedin and in 1997 Kelvin moved to Dublin and became a member of the Graphic Studio, and from 2002 he has worked as a printmaker at Stoney Road Press.

Since his move to Ireland, Kelvin has been involved in a number of large scale private and public commissions. He completed a box set of prints for the producers of Riverdance to coincide with their stage show Pirate Queen which opened in Chicago. As part of an exhibition celebrating the work of the Graphic Print Studio, one of his pieces featured in a show at the National Art Gallery of Ireland in 2008.

His exhibition involvement, both in solo and group exhibitions, includes numerous exhibitions within New Zealand as well as in Ireland, the United Kingdom and Australia. Kelvin was also invited to participate in several touring shows like The Cracked Looking Glass which travelled to Sweden and New York in 2004.

Other international exhibitions include being part of a Group Show in Otaru, Japan;  The Original Print Fair at the Royal Academy in London and The Vichy Small Print Triennial in France

Artist’s statement:
Titles are important to me. I enjoy word play and visual puns. I like them to be amusing, not in a humourous sense, but to be engaging and hold the viewer’s interest in a W. Heath Robinson sort of way. I enjoy mechanics and the exposed working of the machine. Machines that look like something from the industrial revolution, but poorly designed. It is as if they might have once existed, but didn’t stand the test of time. With the benefit of hindsight they were a ridiculous idea. I am fascinated by them, not so much the workings of them but that they work at all.