Playful & engaging art that challenges perspectives
As an interdisciplinary artist, I work across digital and analogue media, layering a range of materials to create playful, engaging and sometimes dark artwork, such as moving image, animation, augmented reality, installation, collage, and performance.
I work on a wide range of commissioned and personal projects from my studio in Norfolk, reinterpreting and responding to narratives, sites, archives and collections. Drawing on my interest in historical themes, beliefs and behaviours, my focal point is female identities, exploring how they are socially constructed and how history has shaped perspectives and perceptions. I am fascinated with invisibility, objectification, oppression, and othering and how these may affect the experience of being a woman in our world today.
I collaborate with museum and heritage organisations to create imaginative and engaging audience experiences. My projects involve commissions, residencies and community projects for clients such as National Trust, Wellcome Collection, Wells Maltings Trust, Ipswich Museums, University College of London, Norwich University of the Arts and North Lincolnshire Museum. My current interests look at creating deeper audience experiences, using immersive, interactive, installation and performative art, which I am excited to apply to new projects in the future.
My personal projects have showcased at The Courtauld Institute of Art, Montreal International Film Festival, The Guildhall Art Gallery, Old Truman Brewery and The Sphinx Fine Art Gallery. In 2021, I was awarded DYCP funding to develop storytelling and filmmaking skills. My solo exhibition, That's Not My Name is currently showing at Normanby Hall as part of an artist residency, with large scale collages, augmented reality and a selection of films. My film I Can See You was awarded Best Original Concept by Jane Austen International Film Festival and received two honourable mentions.
I put my heart and soul into each project, through research, understanding, interpretation and presentation.
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
Commissioners
