About
Female power is central to my practice, whether removed or reclaimed. 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, 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
Tracy Satchwill was born in London in 1968, grew up in South Wales and is now based in Norfolk.
Working across film, collage, photography and installation, her practice explores female power, reflecting on its removal or reclamation. Satchwill draws upon women's history, mythology, science fiction, and popular culture, to create playful and melancholic artwork that challenges perspectives. She weaves personal narratives into her work, exploring identity, oppression and vulnerability to combine the feminine with the disturbing, the surreal, the uncanny and the weird.
Satchwill has exhibited at galleries and institutions across the UK and internationally, including The Courtauld Institute of Art, UK; the Science Museum, UK; the Montreal International History Film Festival, CA; The Sphinx Fine Art Gallery, UK; Guildhall Art Gallery, UK, and Wild Gallery, BE. Satchwill's film I Can See You was awarded Best Original Concept by the Jane Austen International Film Festival and her other films have received numerous honourable mentions. Satchwill has attended residencies at the North Lincolnshire Museum, Normanby Hall and Time and Tide Museum. She 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) at the University of Plymouth and lectures at Anglia Ruskin University, 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
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