Biography

Shelagh WAKELY was born in 1932 in Madingley, a small village in England, and spent much of her youth in Kenya surrounded by ecologists and natural scientists. After working as a research agronomist, she turned to the arts, studying painting and screen-printing at the Chelsea College of Art (1958-1962). Wakely worked as a textile and clothing designer in the 1960s but a research fellowship at the Royal College of Art (1968-1971) led her to sculpture.

Early exhibitions were held 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). 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 in 2021.