About
Artist Statement
I am a contemporary visual artist working across sculpture, installation, drawing, textiles, collage and film. I create tactile, immersive works populated by strange hybrid female beings, symbolic objects and fragments of an imagined world.
My practice explores women, power and control, and asks what might become possible when feminine ways of knowing, remembering and relating are given space to exist. I am interested in the ways women have been shaped, contained and controlled by cultural expectations, and in what happens when those boundaries begin to break down.
My interest in these ideas began early. I grew up in an environment where traditional expectations of women were strongly felt, and became fascinated by the ways power and control can shape women's lives. As a teenager, reading books such as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World deepened my interest in control, conformity and the possibility of imagining different ways of living.
In recent years, my practice has developed into an ongoing process of world-building. I am creating an imagined cosmology inhabited by hybrid beings connected to plants, animals and the land. These beings are part human, part plant and part animal, existing within a world with its own cycles, relationships, rituals and forms of knowledge. Rather than illustrating a fixed mythology, I am discovering this world through the process of making. Drawing, sculpture, materials and ideas feed into one another, gradually revealing its inhabitants, histories and possibilities.
Through this emerging world, I explore transformation, ritual, memory, autonomy, the changing body and our relationship with the natural world. At its heart is a belief that women are powerful and highly valued. I question what the world might look like if feminine knowledge, bodies, relationships and ways of relating to the Earth were valued rather than suppressed. Drawing on real histories, bodies, ecological systems, folklore and lived experience, I ask what a different world built from these things might look like.
The physical process of making is an important part of this exploration. I work intuitively with clay, textiles, paper, plaster, paint, found materials and natural elements, allowing materials to suggest new forms and possibilities. In The Waiting, an outdoor installation of seven hybrid feminine figures, I brought together fabric, thread, wool, drawing, painted surfaces and hanging elements to create a strange gathering within the landscape.
Bio
Tracy Satchwill is a Norfolk-based contemporary artist working across installation, sculpture, drawing, collage, film and sound. Her practice explores feminine power, women's histories, folklore and feminist mythmaking.
Her work has been exhibited widely across the UK, including solo and duo exhibitions at Time and Tide Museum, Normanby Hall and Anteros Art Foundation, and group exhibitions at Gray Area Gallery, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Guildhall Art Gallery and Royal Holloway University. Her multidisciplinary projects have been commissioned by organisations including North Lincolnshire Museum, National Trust, Wellcome Collection and Ipswich & Colchester Museums.
She has undertaken residencies with Time and Tide Museum, Normanby Hall and North Lincolnshire Museum, and has received Arts Council England DYCP grants in 2021 and 2025. She holds an MA in Communication Design from Norwich University of the Arts and a BA (Hons) in Illustration: Design from the University of Plymouth.