We are lost, spiritually adrift. We inhabit a world of road side shrines and makeshift memorials. Art provides a scrapbook resource of images removed from our experience, a place of reference but many of us cannot read them. But still they are important. They contain something essential.
Keith Bayliss, 2011
Shrines are appearing everywhere. They are attached to trees, park benches, viewed from the roadside or a public path. Old places of remembering and contemplation are falling into disuse, becoming redundant, we are a people in need of the spiritual.
Shrine is a response to this phenomenon, an ongoing subject matter and interest. This shrine stands in a small darkened room and consists of a painted structure on tall legs containing a small female figure or deity. On her lap is a small apple. On the floor beneath a stool, painted with a male face. Surrounding the stool, one hundred apples or offerings.
To complete the work the artists son Joe Bayliss, with whom he has now collaborated with on three occasions, produced a haunting soundscape.
