- Énoncé de l'artiste : Sheilagh O'Leary

Born and raised a Newfoundlander, my influences for Fine Art Photography focused at an early stage on women, sexual politics, and the Newfoundland experience. This subconscious composite of ideas and belief systems has given way to the connection between the raw, ever-expressive and many times violent relationship to the environment, and the sexual imagery I create.

Beginning with a series of provocative nudes, depicting women sexually oppressed by Roman Catholic philosophy, I discovered my particular interest in portraits and nudes.

The manipulation of ideas on both eroticism and pornography, created by women themselves, is a challenge to the age old system that fosters objectification. With a rise in erotic imagery in ou 90s culture, my work has been influenced by a process of self-objectification, exploring my own body as the "image-maker".

It was at my residency at Banff Centre for the Arts where I began working through nude self-portraits, and thus the Installation works that have been exhibited in "IMPACT: Public Installation works by Atlantic Canada". It was imperative to study how a woman photographed can retain rights of her own body, enabling the artist/object to prevent a dichotomy of the sexual and the sacred.

"ISLAND MAID", is a four year project that has taken myself and writer Rhonda Pelley into the homes and lives of older women living on the coastline of the Island of Newfoundland. Documenting women's stories that have rarely been represented, the aim is to publish a book of portraits and text along with an exhibition of photographs, aiding in the construction of a recorded history for women.

Naturally progressing from this combined interest in images of older women and nude portraits, my next series will be nude portraits of older women, one that in my mind could not possibly be undertaken without first understanding the artist's own body, and the implications and delicacy of this form of objectification.

- O'LEARY, Sheilagh


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