Within these works, Keefe references “Scorched Earth”: the ancient practice of destroying the enemy’s village, where buildings, food supply, water sources, and energy supply are decimated. There is nothing left to go back to. There is only moving away from one’s “home.” Within this journey, one sets out by land and water, acknowledging that once cast out from everything known, there is the present moment which becomes a profound struggle for faith and endurance to survive.

Much of the work in the exhibit also translates presently as global detachment and disinterest of forced mass migration by political unrest, economic poverty, and profound changes in our global collective climates. Keefe’s drawing series of Re-mapping Islands, imagines these visual displacements of a forced liberation by expulsion, creating by proxy, a way forward. But where is it they will go?

The journey is imperative to take. If it is not taken, there may/will be no internal peace, as the wanderer finds their way back to something meaningful, between the descending darkness, and ascendance of light.

Keefe says about her work:
“In my studio I try to paint the terrible beauty of nature with a sense of eternal hope of the human spirit.”