About
Artist Statement
As a teenager, while reading Brave New World, I recognised a society that wielded immense power to control, oppress, and manipulate, alongside figures who sought to rebel against that system. This early awareness of power and resistance has remained central to my practice, which holds a long-standing attention to women’s lived experiences, particularly those shaped by erasure, suppression, and silence.
My work is driven by women’s inner worlds and emotional states. Drawing on my experiences of growing up in rural Wales as an outsider, I have developed a sensitivity to marginalisation, belonging, and voice. The work often begins by listening for what has been carried, endured, or left unresolved.
I create immersive, tactile installations that hold space for women’s presence and forms of feminine power that have been obscured or misread. Passive or idealised representations of femininity are disrupted through the use of the surreal, the uncanny, and the strange. Viewers are invited to enter these environments and sit with tension, presence, and power rather than observe from a distance.
Working across installation, drawing, collage, film, sound, and sculpture, I bring these media together through a layered, collage-based approach. I enjoy overlaying materials such as paint, text, texture, and archival elements, allowing the work to unfold through analogue processes. In my recent installation A Gallus Un, this approach took the form of working directly onto calico fabric using accumulated marks, objects, and surface treatments.
More recently, my practice has shifted toward reclaiming and reawakening forms of feminine power through symbolism, folklore, ritual, and speculative storytelling. Reading around Palaeolithic and Neolithic cultures has deepened my interest in belief systems, material traces, and feminine presence embedded in objects, spaces, and landscapes.
I am interested in how bodies move through space and how materials carry memory. My installations are made to be entered, sensed, and engaged with, offering an invitation to feel, rather than to conclude.
Bio
Tracy Satchwill is a Norfolk-based contemporary artist working across installation, sculpture, experimental drawing, collage and film. Her practice explores women’s histories, folklore and feminist mythmaking, creating immersive, tactile environments that reimagine feminine power, autonomy and presence. She is particularly interested in how women’s bodies and stories have been erased, suppressed or misread, and how forms of the sacred, wild and sometimes ‘monstrous’ feminine can be re-centred within contemporary culture.
Drawing on goddess narratives, rural folklore and mythic archetypes, Satchwill works intuitively with raw, sensuous materials including clay, fabric, plaster and found text. Through processes of layering, assemblage and symbolic construction, she builds charged spaces that explore themes of transformation, embodiment, care, mortality and ecological connection to land.
Satchwill is currently developing A Gallus Un, an immersive audiovisual installation commissioned by North Lincolnshire Museum, and expanding her sculptural practice through an Arts Council England DYCP award. Her work is in an exploratory phase, experimenting with new materials and spatial forms to deepen her feminist, myth-led visual language.
Her work has been exhibited across the UK at venues including The Courtauld Institute of Art, Gray Area Gallery and Guildhall Art Gallery. Her award-winning film I Can See You received Best Original Concept at the Jane Austen International Film Festival, and her moving image and installation work has featured in museums, galleries and festivals nationally and internationally.
She has undertaken residencies with North Lincolnshire Museum, Normanby Hall and Time and Tide Museum, and completed commissions for organisations including the National Trust, Wellcome Collection, and Ipswich + Colchester Museums.
Satchwill holds an MA from Norwich University of the Arts and is based in Norwich, Norfolk.
