About
Bio
Tracy Satchwill is an interdisciplinary artist from Wales, based in Norfolk. She works with female themes across analogue and digital media, such as film, video art, collage art, interactive experience, and installation.
Her projects have been showcased at The Courtauld Institute of Art, the Montreal International Film Festival and The Sphinx Fine Art Gallery. Her film I Can See You was awarded Best Original Concept by the Jane Austen International Film Festival and received two honourable mentions. She also works with creative and culture partners on a variety of public commissions, including National Trust, Wellcome Collection and Ipswich Museums, and has resided as an artist in residence at North Lincolnshire Museum and Normanby Hall.
She was recently an artist-in-residence at the Time and Tide Museum in Great Yarmouth, creating Gold Drunk, a surreal film inspired by the British Empire, cabinets of curiosity and museum acquisitions, responding to their theme Not Made in Great Yarmouth. She also lectures at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge on the BA (Hons) Digital Media Production course.
Artist Statement
The female is central to my work. I give a voice to the women who need to scream, shout, fight, rebel and reclaim their position. Through playful storytelling, I often bring my protagonists into provocative dystopian worlds. I question their injustices, reflecting on the belief systems and power structures that affect an individual, drawing from my own experience of being bullied and controlled as a child.
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 Wales, as an outsider and dyslexic, in an unsettling misogynist environment. 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 art, collage art, interactive experience, and installation. I apply a collage approach, overlaying different elements, such as imagery, text, archives, found objects, sounds, footage, animation, and mark-making. In Idleness in a Great Source of Evil, I fuse different film techniques, including stop motion, green screen, location shots, CCTV footage, collage animation with text, photography, and mark-making.
'Tracy calls attention to the manner to 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
Text
Exhibitionism: The Art of Display
Tracy Satchwill’s excerpts from The Life of Marie Antoinette presents 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 captures the French Queens signature love of ornament and spectacle. By representing historical events as theatrical scenes, Satchwill calls attention to the manner to 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
