SANDRA SHEEHY: WRAPTURES September 12-October 13, 2007

Sandra Sheehy’s work is explosive in its orchid-like voluptuousness. One can look at these obsessively stitched, beaded and drawn constructions from a distance and also from close and get different readings on the intricate processes of her world. The work however is not solipsistic, no more so than the inter-tangled greenery of a forest glade or the play of light and animal life on a deep reef.

This new work discovers more layers of the language she began exploring a number of years ago. There is more painting and there is more of a sense of these being packets of imagery, almost like African nkisi, objects that bind faith and seal secrets. The process is as important as the result but these seem almost occult, exorcised of any evil, set out on the wall to heal the viewer, to draw him/her into a world that allows for exploration of the hypnogogic state while remaining awake. This is the true success of a visionary, non-doctrinal art.

“They are expressions of my love and wonder at what is around me. The pulsing world, the microscopic life that teems around and within us, our hearts and organs, the stars, everything to marvel at and revel in.”

There is something pagan about these pieces. Their language is lush and powerfully female. The forms are organic and some of the pieces fight their borders to become three-dimensional. By revealing thousands of details they become pithy pieces of music concrete, filled as much with the sounds of bird cries and love moans as with the rubbing of resinous strings. Sheehy is inventing a vocabulary as she goes along and invites us into the process. She reveals also and still manages a sense of delicious concealment.