About
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 an unsettling misogynist 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.
'Satchwill calls attention to the manner in which we perform history. By translating real events into stories, she blurs the line between truth & fiction.'
Mia Curran, Curator, Exhibitionism: The Art of Display, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House
Bio
Tracy Satchwill (b. 1968, London) is an interdisciplinary artist and advocate for women’s rights, based in Norfolk and raised in Wales. Her work spans film, video, collage, interactive experience, and installation, exploring themes of female empowerment, rebellion, and identity.
Satchwill delves into women’s history, mythology, science fiction, and popular culture, creating playful yet melancholic works that challenge perspectives and reclaim power. By weaving personal narratives into her art, she confronts identity, oppression, and vulnerability, blending the feminine with surreal, uncanny, and unsettling elements.
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. Satchwill's film I Can See You won Best Original Concept at the Jane Austen International Film Festival, and her other films have received multiple accolades.
Satchwill has completed residencies with North Lincolnshire Museum, Normanby Hall, and Time and Tide Museum, and has worked on public commissions for the National Trust, Wellcome Collection, and Ipswich + Colchester Museums. She holds an MA with distinction from Norwich University of the Arts, a BA (Hons) from the University of Plymouth, and lectures at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge.
Text
Exhibitionism: The Art of Display
Tracy Satchwill’s excerpts from The Life of Marie Antoinette present fantastical episodes of whimsy and splendour. Composed of a combination of illustration, collage, photography and found objects, Satchwill’s three-dimensional toy theatres are intricately composed scenes of artifice. First invented as advertisements for playhouses, Victorian Toy Theatre quickly assumed a private role independent from the public stage. Toy theatre brought drama into the middle-class home, allowing children and adults informally to direct their own plays. Satchwill reinvents this Victorian tradition to illustrate historical narratives. Her contemporary toy theatres are frozen in time, thus removing the element of personal agency and continuous movement from the dioramas. This removal of viewer interaction is fitting for illustrating the story of Marie Antoinette, who was notorious for her obliviousness to the common man. Furthermore, the bright colours and elaborate decorations of toy theatres wittily capture the French Queen's signature love of ornament and spectacle. By representing historical events as theatrical scenes, Satchwill calls attention to the manner in which we perform history. By translating real events into stories, historians blur the line between truth and fiction.
Mia Curran
Curator
Exhibitionism: The Art of Display, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House
