With its noble trees, winding paths, sprawling views, and magnificent monuments, Elmwood Cemetery is a place of peace, not just for the dead but for the living. For artist Martha Kelly, the historical site has been a source of inspiration, a quiet spot to sketch and paint trees and statues, a “mishmash of visual elements,” as she calls it. Now, after years of drawing and painting and printmaking images of Elmwood, Kelly’s own art is about to become a part of the cemetery’s permanent landscape.
Last year, the cemetery commissioned the artist to create a design for three granite columbaria outside the Chapel, which bear the names Oak, Willow, and Maple. Engraver Brian Griffin of Saltillo, Mississippi, recently finished carving Kelly’s design on-site.
For the commission, the cemetery board had selected the three tree names for the columbaria but otherwise gave Kelly free rein. “Trees are kind of in my wheelhouse,” she says. “I’m traditionally a landscape artist. And I have walked out here and sketched so much. I love the history, and I wanted to honor it in a way that is new, and that is current, and that is appropriate for my work, but also have those echoes coming forward. So they had the tree names. And I said, ‘What if I pair it with a statue [that’s already in Elmwood]?’ And everybody fell in love with that.”
So, Oak is paired with one of the angels who presides over an Elmwood grave. In her statue form, she holds an anchor, a Christian symbol for hope, but on the columbarium, she holds a branch to be more inclusive. Willow, meanwhile, is paired with Margaret Turley, whose memorial statue Kelly sketches regularly. “I felt like [the willow] was a very graceful complement to who she was,” she says.
Lastly, Maple is paired with Emily Sutton’s statue. “She’s my favorite story out here,” Kelly says. Sutton was a madam, who turned her brothel into a hospital during the 1873 yellow fever epidemic and nursed the dying until she herself died. “They put up the statue of her. But the cranky old men who were in charge at the cemetery at the time said, ‘Oh, no, no, we don’t want people to just think she was a hero or anything.’ So they took her madam name, which was Fannie Walker, and they put it in very large letters on stones on three sides around her monument, so people would know that she wasn’t a pristine woman. When I heard that story, I was like, ‘Oh, I think she gets a second round of acclaim.’”
Before selecting these three feminine figures, Kelly had experimented with sketches of other statues in the cemetery, including a few statues of men. “But these three emerged for me,” she says. “I thought this is fitting. This is what I want for here, for now. There’s something about women and trees. They feel right together somehow. … And there’s a lot of statues of men out there. I’m not saying I wouldn’t do a male figure if I end up getting to do more of these, but it was important to me to center women in public art because that hasn’t been the tradition. There’s a handful of them out there, but not that many.”
And the same can be said for women who have been credited for their art over the centuries, Kelly points out. “There’s so much work by women that hasn’t been credited,” she says. “[Elmwood] insisted on putting my name on [the columbaria] which I really appreciate. They sent me the mock-up and I’m like, ‘I think [my name] is a little big.’ They said, ‘It’s fine. We like it.’ I’m like, ‘Okay.’ … I’m just so tickled.”
This installation will also be Kelly’s first piece of public art. “There’s an extra bit of responsibility and wonder that goes into making art for something like this,” she says. “It really just meant a lot in so many different ways, because of the place, because of the purpose.
“I grew up here. I’m living in my grandparents’ house. I have a lot of history in the city. It means a lot to get to leave a small mark behind me as a lifelong artist who loves Memphis, loves the trees that we have. … This is where I want to live. So it just really means a lot, to me as someone with my roots very deep in Memphis, to get to have made something out of our history and out of our trees that’s gonna last.”
Elmwood Cemetery will host a free celebration of Martha Kelly’s public art on Sunday, November 19th, 3-5 p.m. Harbert Avenue Porch Orchestra will perform. RSVP at elmwoodcemetery.org.
