About
Bio
Tracy Satchwill (b. 1968, London) is an experiential artist and filmmaker based in Norfolk, raised in Wales. Her multidisciplinary practice spans film, installation, collage, object-making, and interactive experiences, creating immersive, symbolic environments that challenge dominant narratives around femininity, mythology, and power.
Satchwill’s work is rooted in eco-feminist ideas, women’s histories, and mythic or surreal storytelling. She blends the feminine with the uncanny and unsettling to craft emotionally charged artworks, installations and visual worlds led by rebellious, otherworldly female figures. Her work provokes, enchants, and empowers, inviting viewers into dreamlike, richly layered narratives.
Her work has been exhibited across the UK and internationally, including at The Courtauld Institute of Art, Science Museum, Montreal International History Film Festival, Sphinx Fine Art Gallery, Guildhall Art Gallery, and Wild Gallery. Her award-winning film I Can See You received Best Original Concept at the Jane Austen International Film Festival.
She has undertaken residencies with North Lincolnshire Museum, Normanby Hall, and Time and Tide Museum, and completed commissions for the National Trust, Wellcome Collection, and Ipswich + Colchester Museums. Satchwill holds an MA with distinction from Norwich University of the Arts and a BA (Hons) from the University of Plymouth, and she lectures in Digital Media Production at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge.
Artist Statement
My practice is deeply rooted in women's experiences, exploring the removal and reclamation of their power. Through playful storytelling, I bring my protagonists into provocative dystopian worlds. I question their injustices, helping them to rebel against the belief systems and power structures that affect an individual, drawing from my own childhood experiences in a controlling, misogynistic environment.
I occasionally take on the roles of accused witches, hysterical suffragettes, and frustrated housewives. I empathise with their frustrations, sadness, and rage, reflecting on my own life as a young girl growing up in rural Wales, as an outsider and dyslexic. I fuel this emotion by creating tension in my work, combining the feminine with the disturbing, including the surreal, the uncanny and the weird. I am inspired by Eastern European filmmakers who apply these elements to seduce their audience into a state of being to feel discomfort, ask questions, and have a shift in perception.
My work takes inspiration from history, mythology, science fiction, and popular culture. I work across digital and analogue outcomes, including film, video, collage, interactive experience, and installation. I apply a collage approach, overlaying various elements, such as imagery, text, archives, found objects, sounds, footage, animation, and mark-making. In Idleness in a Great Source of Evil, I fuse many film techniques, including stop motion, green screen, location shots, CCTV footage, collage animation with text, photography, and mark-making.
Recently, my focus has turned to the figure of Mother Earth as a symbol of protection, resistance, and reclamation. In a world facing ecological crisis and ongoing gender inequality, I explore how the feminine, often dismissed or devalued, holds transformative power. This work asks: What might change if we viewed the Earth not as a resource to be exploited, but as a powerful, autonomous feminine force? Through this lens, I connect environmental urgency with the historical and cultural suppression of women’s voices, reimagining both as sites of rage, resilience, and renewal.
Selected Commissions & Collaborations
Tracy’s past commissions include Magna Carta Women, A Home and a Husband, and Striving for Perfection — immersive and narrative-led projects that explored women’s rights, domestic roles, and cultural ideals. She has also collaborated with institutions including the Wellcome Collection and North Lincolnshire Museum on illustration and film-based commissions.
These collaborations have informed her current focus on myth, female power, and experiential installation.
