Shelagh Wakely took part in 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, drawings, prints and video. She was also an early pioneer of installation art, being one of the first women to develop this area of her practise. Despite the diversity of her work, her oeuvre circles around a cluster of themes relating to fragility, time, aging and decay. Her work was also informed and inspired by her visits and in-depth study of Brazil, along with the work of influential Brazilian artist Tunga (1952-2016), with whom she collaborated in the 1990s.
Wakely studied painting and screen-printing at the Chelsea College of Art (1958-1962), and a research fellowship at the Royal College of Art (1968-1971) led her to sculpture. Early institutional exhibitions include at the Serpentine Gallery, London, UK (1977); Institute of Contemporary Art, London, UK (1979); The John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, UK (1982); and The Showroom, London, UK (1989). Later in her career, she worked on numerous outdoor installations, including Rainsquare at South London Gallery (1994) and other public commissions for the Royal Albert Hall, London, UK (2001); Marunouchi Building, Tokyo, Japan (2002); Beckenham Beacon Hospital, Kent, UK (2009); and Nottingham University Hospital City Campus, Nottingham, UK (2010).
Her work was posthumously featured in a solo exhibition 'A View from a Window' at Camden Arts Centre, London in 2014 and was included in Manchester Art Gallery's group exhibition 'Speech Acts: Reflections-Imagination-Repetition' in 2018; in 'Psychic Wounds: On Art and Trauma' at The Warehouse, Dallas, in 2020-2021; as well as in 'A Very Special Place: Ikon in the 1990s' at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, 2021.
In 2023, her work was included in two important group shows, ‘If Not Now, When? Generations of Women in Sculpture in Britain 1960-2023’ at the Hepworth Wakefield and Saatchi Gallery, London and ‘Making New Worlds: Li Yua -Chia and Friends’ at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge. Her Estate is currently represented by Richard Saltoun Gallery and she has works in various important public collections, including the Tate.
