Shelagh wakely biography
Wakely was born in a small village in England and spent much of her youth in Kenya surrounded by ecologists and natural scientists....
Shelagh Wakely was a British sculptor and experimental artist.
Shelagh Wakely was part of the alchemy of the British Sculpture Movement of the 1980s, with fellow artists Richard Deacon, Shirazeh Houshiary, Barry Flanagan and Anish Kapoor, amongst others. With a prolific career spanning more than four decades, Wakely produced an impressive body of work comprising sculpture, installation, drawings, prints and video.
A pioneer of installation art, her artworks are illusionary plays on perception that disturb patterns of thinking and seeing and are characterised by tender marks, ghost-like and evanescent, made with a variety of media: from clay to wire, cut silk to gilded fruit, ink on paper to canvas. Despite the diversity of her work, her oeuvre circles around a cluster of themes relating to fragility, time, aging and decay, all united by her singular interest in 'the surface' - as a shield, a barrier, a sign, a veneer.
Her sensuous work was also inspired by the flamboyant and lavish decorations of Brazil, along with the work of Br