Sandra Sheehy was born in 1965 in Norfolk, England. Although she enjoyed painting and drawing all her life, she stopped these activities after she took a course in illustration while at school, because she said it made her lose confidence in her own creativity.
Ms. Sheehy relays:
A couple of years later (after the illustration course) I found some embroidery threads in a shop. All the colors arranged neatly side-by-side, each separate but affecting the color next to it. They were so appealing, pure and unconnected to any work I had tried before. I bought them and made something and my hands were very happy. I made more and more and gradually arrived at the work . . . I make today. In my early work, the material is stretched over a wooden hoop and I have no plan to execute, only the need to make something. I always work on one piece at a time; it would be like a spell broken if I hopped from one to another.
I always seem to start in the center and it grows outwards. I feel a great sense of urgency when working and I feel very driven towards a goal. But I never seem to know what that goal is. It’s a feeling I have to express. They are not representations of any one thing but I think they represent my inner self. The part of myself that very rarely comes to the surface in everyday life but is a unique constant deep inside. They are expressions of my love and wonder at what is around me. The pulsing world, the microscopic life that teems around and within our hearts, organs and the stars, us everything to marvel at and revel in. My later sculptural work has a chicken-wire base over which fabric, and sometimes paper is layered.
In a 2013 New York Times review, Roberta Smith wrote: . . . . Sheehy’s work suggests ties to past and present eccentric abstractionists like Eva Hesse, Judith Scott, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Alexandra Bircken and Anna Betbeze. . . . Each of Ms. Sheehy’s efforts is an extravagant, compressed world unto itself, at once beautiful and grotesque, natural and willfully made. (NYT, 1/11/2013)