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 resist. 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 experience 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 environments and tactile works 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 surreal, the uncanny, and the strange. Forms shift towards the instinctive or animal, where bodies become hybrid, resistant, or not entirely knowable. Viewers are invited to enter, encounter, and sit with tension, presence, and power.
Working across installation, sculpture, drawing, collage, film, and sound, I bring these elements together through a layered, collage-based approach. Materials such as paint, text, fabric, and found objects are built up, disrupted, and reworked, allowing meaning to emerge through analogue processes. In A Gallus Un, this took the form of working directly onto calico using accumulated marks, objects, and surface treatments.
More recently, my practice has shifted toward reclaiming and reawakening feminine power through symbolism, folklore, ritual, and speculative storytelling. Research into 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 work invites a sensory encounter, where meaning is felt as much as understood.
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 recently completed A Gallus Un, an immersive multi-sensory installation commissioned by North Lincolnshire Museum, and is 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.
