Since 1980 I have been executing large-scale drawings, one-of-a-kind books, smaller drawings on handmade paper, and temporary wall drawing installations which are site specific and usually destroyed after the show. A combined process of materials is used: wax, pigment, vaseline, chalk, crayon, oilstick, charcoal and collage elements.

In my installations I am concerned with the recovery of space through instinctive gesture. The archetypal wall, its structure a monumental act of enclosure, speaks as a refuge of willed silence. The room is a container, as is the body; the walls are its skin. Considering the fragility and vulnerability of our own viscera, the externalization of body organs and bone structure is a revelation - the public display of a private mystery, an emotional landscape.

Gestures of the body, gestures of the site; architecture of the body, architecture of emotion; politics of the body, politics of the space. Transfigurations of the body, questioning our cultural and sexual attitudes.

Shelagh Keeley