Rise and fall of the maestro of the macabre

Catherine Pepinster recalls the rise to infamy of Anthony Kelly, an artist with a cadaverous touch

IT WAS a chance remark by an eager PR woman that led me to meet Anthony-Noel Kelly and discover his macabre art. Jibby Bean came into the office of the Independent on Sunday to talk to us about the London contemporary Arts Fair, and let drop, casually, that one of the exhibitors was sculpting parts of the human body using limbs and sections of corpses. After she left, the editor, Rosie Boycott, other staff and I looked at one another with some incredulity. We rang up Kelly, asked to visit, and off I went.

Few people I have met as a journalist have made such an impact on me as Kelly did that day. He was in a studio in Clapham, surrounded by tanks, dripping taps, developed photographs of naked people hanging up to dry, and silver figures of humans, lovingly cast from moulds made from actual remains. There were heads of old men, the side of another, looking more like a ham in a butcher's display than part of person, hands cut at the wrist.

It was January 1997. Outside, it was hovering at freezing point; inside, the studio was icy. Kelly, with his unkempt hair, cadaverous, high-cheekboned face, and intense gaze, fascinated me. It is rare to meet anyone so committed, so strong in their self-belief. He asserted his absolute right to do what he did - take pieces of corpses and use them for his own artistic purposes. It took an effort to remember he had no right to take these parts. What might relatives of the dead feel about his covert theft, his taking of human remains from a medical college which had pledged to respect them? He seemed genuinely concerned about their feelings.

"I have no qualms about doing this work. I would not wish to hurt anyone," he said. What was apparent, though, was that he had the arrogance that comes with conviction. These people did not matter as much as his own artistic endeavour.

But there was something reckless about Kelly too. The fact that he had agreed to exhibit at the fair, to let the PR mention it to us, and allow me, with a photographer, come into studio for two and a half hours, and witness his trade in the dead. The way he spoke of what he did betrayed his delight in dicing with danger too: "To get them was a sweat, under cover of darkness," he said. "I had the police on me once because someone had tipped them off. I still had some body pieces I hadn't yet used and I had to destroy them."

Then, as we moved upstairs to his living-room to chat over coffee, surrounded by golden horses' legs, hanging from hooks as meat in an abattoir where Kelly learned his craft of butchery, he dropped a little gem. He explained that as well as his own art, he was a tutor at the Prince of Wales's Institute of Architecture.

It was that fact, and the grisly details of his corpses, which drew all the other papers, especially the tabloids, to follow up my story the following week. But on the Sunday morning, what did for Kelly was a particular reader of the Independent on Sunday - Dr Laurence Martin, Her Majesty's Inspector of Anatomy, who alerted the police. The result was yesterday's criminal conviction. Since my first visit to Kelly's studio, people have asked me: "Didn't it give you the creeps, visiting that man?" No, it didn't.

I didn't believe for one moment that I would be sliced into bits. Yes, here was a man obsessed with death, but at least he faced it.

"You look at them and remind yourself, this is how we all end up," was how he put it. Today, our sanitised world tries not to think about the end of life, and the experience of dying. He did. After he was arrested, I went to see him again. There were journalists outside his studio. I rang the bell: he said his solicitor had told him not to speak to anyone. When I explained that I had brought him some lilies, he came to the door, said "Hello darling," and invited me in. There seemed to be no hard feelings: I got my follow-up story. When I left, the pack of reporters pursued me down the street. I got a glimpse, then, of what I had unleashed.