Rose Finn-Kelcey was born in Northampton. She studied at Ravensbourne College of Art and Design, and at Chelsea School of Art, London. She has lived and worked in London since 1968.
Finn-Kelcey first came to prominence in the early 1970's. She made a series of flags bearing short messages that made reference to the wind and weather in which they were shown or to the buildings on which they were fixed: Here is a Gale Warning (installed on top of the BBC 2 Broadcasting Station, Alexander Palace, 1970), Fog (Nottingham Castle 1971), Power for the People (Battersea and Bankside Power Stations, 1972).
Finn-Kelcey's artistic oeuvre is characterised by unpredictability, with each work changing dramatically from one to the next. From 1975 - 1985 Finn-Kelcey's work was almost entirely performance based, including works such as One for Sorrow Two for Joy (Acme Gallery, London,1976) and The Boilermakers' Assistant (London Calling, 1978). In 1980 she introduced the idea of a 'vacated performance' in an effort to express a desire to be both inside and yet objectively outside a work, as epitomised by Mind the Gap, (ICA, London, 1980), Glory (Serpentine Gallery, 1983) and Black and Blue (Matt's Gallery, London, 1984).
The late 80's saw a move to more installation based work with a performative element. Bureau de Change (Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, 1986 and Matt's Gallery, London, 1987) was a reconstruction of Van Gogh's Sunflowers in £1,000 worth of coinage (which was reconfigured in dollars and yen for the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York 1990).
In the early 90's Finn-Kelcey made work that challenged the material and spiritual limits of our built environment through works such as her room sized block of steam (held in place by cold air curtains), (Chisenhale Gallery, London, 1992 and Saatchi Gallery, London, 1993) and its counterpart, The Royal Box, a cubicle of ice in a walk-in fridge (Angel Row, Nottingham, 1992 and Saatchi Gallery, 1993).
Invocations of the spiritual are a recurring motif in Finn-Kelcey's work and can be seen is works such as God Kennel (1992) for Documenta IX, her solo exhibition at Camden Arts Centre, 1997 (which included the works Pearly Gate, Souls and the Jolly God), It Pays to Pray, her first truly interactive work using vending machines to display prayers animated on an LED screen (River walk, Millennium Dome, 1999 and Cass Sculpture Foundation, 2001) and Angel (2004), an 80 metre square 'emoticon' projected onto the exterior of St. Paul's Church, East London (which won the ACE Award in 2007).
Finn-Kelcey's recent work includes a poster entitled Loaf for London Underground (2008) and two editions of laser cuts, PEEK-A-BOO and Beat Bullying (2009). Additionally, ongoing since 2008 is a public artwork for the Battle Hospital site, Reading, Berkshire. She is currently compiling a book that will cover her work from 1968 to 2009.
Finn-Kelcey's body of work is a complex amalgam of themes which investigate power, the dilemmas of mastery, the myth of the artist, the nature of collaboration, the surrogate performer, spirituality, longing and death. However, the use of language and the spiritual, underscored by irony and wit, consistently recur throughout her oeuvre.
Rose Finn-Kelcey's work can be found in national and international collections, most notably within The Tate Gallery Collection, The Arts Council Collection, The British Council Collection, The Victoria & Albert Collection, the Welkunst Foundation and the Bernard Starkman Collection.