Margaret Keelan: Reality Twice Removed

BY SUSANNAH ISRAEL

“Margaret Keelan’s clay sculptures present us with a marvelous visual contradiction. These figures are the texture of desiccated old wood, coated with cracked and peeling paint, yet their poses are natural and their gestures are evocative. Examining them closely, we infer a long history and a lifetime of experience.

Getting inside the studio with Keelan is a rare chance to get inside the mind of the artist. Here I discovered that the childish figures the dolls embody actually begin as beautifully modelled sculptures, which another artist might present as finished. On her studio worktable a solemn little girl, balanced on sturdy legs, reaches up to hold an enormous blue butterfly, her facial features soft and delicate. The clay is just past wet, the piece just completed.

Keelan uses classic ecorche’ techniques, where the model is skinless and the muscles are shown; she calls this building from the inside out. Correct modelling and anatomical accuracy are important. Yet the artist is aware of what she calls “the tyranny of realism”. She says, “You need a distance–with sections, or texture–ways of keeping it sculpture. The story here is this has been sculpted into existence. It is not a child, not a doll. It is reality twice removed.”

At this moment, it is hard to imagine this lifelike sculpture changing to match its predecessors in the kiln room, transmogrified into cracked wood and peeling paint, indelibly stained and worn. Graduate studies with Marilyn Levine, the Modernist trompe Voeil master, remain traceable in Keelan’s signature surface development. The viewer finds it nearly impossible not to touch.

Why work with old wooden doll images? Keelan says “I loved the weathered wood look, which was to me a metaphor for growing older and ‘weathering’ down to our essential being. But my desire for (making) the work preceded the techniques. I have an itch and I scratch it.”

The Spanish word for doll is muneca, which means both doll and wrist. Considering this in terms of Keelan’s oeuvre, the hand certainly activates the doll, in this case not by manipulating a puppet but through the creation of a form. The image and content of the doll seem as uncompromising as a sonnet: rigid, predictable and confining.

Keelan has other ideas. The doll form does not connote personal childhood memories, but does have one autobiographic influence; the figures are always female. She says “I can only tell the truth of my own story–how I perceive the world over time and how my perspectives change. It must be an authentic experience.” Asked about her strong sense of the formal, she gives an example unknown to this US-raised writer: as a young child in England she read weekly adventure stories about girl ballerinas who were detectives and solved mysteries and crimes. She also says that as a child in England she saw ballet regularly and she retained a strong sense of formality about the sets and costumes and the children posing and performing.

The potters wheel was Keelan’s first love, eventually leading her to sculpting. She lived in England until the age of 10, when she moved with her family to Canada. Keelan takes her rightful place among the new tradition of sculptors, raised on the potters’ wheel, who value the traditions and training of functional makers. ‘The pottery concept,” she notes, “is interactive by definition.” Keelan moved to the US to earn her MFA at Salt Lake City, Utah, studying with Marilyn Levine. She began exhibiting professionally in San Francisco in 1988, and is the Associate Director of Sculpture at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.

  -article introduction - please see Ceramics Art and Perception, No. 103 pp 70-75. 2016