Sam Keogh’s ‘The Unicorn is Killed and Brought to the Castle’ is a performative story-telling of a written script that draws from ‘The Hunt of the Unicorn’ - a series of seven tapestries made in Flanders, 16th century. In this performance, Keogh moves between the works, taking on different characters and narrative roles - It plays heavily with the Lord of the Rings, and a video game The Dark Souls which a big element of this ‘cartoon’. However, this work is also self referential, which activates a sense of humour within the work - as the drawings make reference to their own fragility and materiality as paper; “Collage made up of drawn elements from paper attached with tape”, “the tape suggests a mobility of parts, movement or animation” and “when I’m making a drawing, time bends around the task" are just some examples of self reflection within the piece.

“Both present and absent, it protrudes into fantasy and retracts under scrutiny” is a description of a unicorn given by Keogh, which speaks to the language of his own work, through fantastical play and artistic scrutiny.

In this interview with The Douglas Hyde Gallery Keogh states that he became an artist as it seemed like an ‘interesting way to annoy people I don’t like’, that ‘people could find this confronting and irritating’ - and that being an artist was a way to never have to get a job. This resonates with my practice as it mirrors the sense of insolence needed to be an artist, and this insolence is reflected in his work, that because of it’s mobility through the tape, is constantly changing and creating new challenges for the viewer.

In this interview Keogh describes the connective language that takes place between sculptural elements, collage and writing which is brought together through installation, in which a performance will take place. The sculpture and collage are used ‘or manipulated by me in the performance’ - Similar to Tai Shani, in their duality of stand alone sculptural pieces that double as props for performances, both artists maintain an essential layer of transcendentalism through motion and art that can be activated and de-activated by the artist (which is something that Delaine De Bas talks about in her work ‘Stranger in Silver, Walking on Air’).