Tara Keegan is a multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, installation, sound, and social practice. Her work explores the human body as both subject and material a dynamic site of transformation, memory, and tension. Central to her practice is a deep engagement with the body’s ability to regenerate, rupture, and adapt in response to internal and external forces. For Keegan, the body is not fixed, but a mutable archive of sensation, emotion, and lived experience.

Rooted in a sculptural language inspired by biological systems from cellular life to reproductive organs, illness, and decay, Keegan translates these internal worlds into soft, tactile forms that blur the line between the familiar and the uncanny. Her materials, primarily textiles and mixed media, are manipulated through bodily gestures such as stitching, stuffing, binding, knotting, and stretching. These acts of making evoke care, trauma, and repair, allowing the work to carry the trace of the hand and the emotional weight of the body. Her sculptural forms often appear in states of flux ambiguous objects that oscillate between inside and outside, growth and collapse, seduction and discomfort. They resist categorization, instead suggesting presence through absence a fragment, an echo, or a residue of the body. Keegan’s work invites an embodied phenomenology where touch, proximity, and sensory experience are central modes of engagement.

Increasingly, Keegan incorporates sound as a sculptural and spatial medium. Drawing on recordings of the internal body, breath, heartbeat, digestive rhythms she expands her exploration of the corporeal beyond the visual. Sound becomes a way of inhabiting space differently, transforming the body into an emotional, affective, and autonomous realm marked by vulnerability, intensity, and nonverbal intelligence.

Chance and intuition play vital roles in Keegan’s process, allowing form and meaning to emerge organically. This openness echoes the unpredictable rhythms of the body itself always in negotiation with time, trauma, memory, and healing. The resulting forms resist legibility. They hover in a state of tension between the organic and the constructed, the seductive and the abject, the intimate and the alien.

Originally from Brisbane, Australia, Keegan has lived extensively in Ireland and is currently based in County Clare. She holds a BA in Sculpture & Combined Media (2017) and an MA in Social Practice & the Creative Environment (2018) from the Limerick School of Art & Design. Her academic background in social practice continues to shape the participatory aspects of her work, where community engagement, dialogue, and embodied knowledge intersect with material experimentation.

Keegan’s work has been exhibited in a variety of contexts, including Ties that Bind 126 Gallery, Galway (2025) Sustainable Sculpture at Trinity College Dublin’s Green Week (2024), Artlink in Buncrana (2024), Ephemeral Elegance: Women in Artistic Reflection with Cista Arts (2024), Haus-A-Rest (2024), Process at 126 Artist-Run Gallery, Galway (2019), Waterford Arts Festival (2017), and the Electric Picnic Arts Trail (2016–present). In 2017, she represented Ireland in Strasbourg, France, for the Benches for Europe – SPE Design Awards.

She is an active member of Visual Artists Ireland (VAI), Ormston House (Limerick), 126 Artist-Run Gallery (Galway), and the Clare Arts Office’s Artist in Schools Programme (2020–2026). Keegan also maintains close affiliations with the Limerick School of Art & Design and Limerick Institute of Technology.

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