Tracy Satchwill

The female is central to my practice. I give voice to women who need to scream, shout, fight, rebel, and reclaim their power. Through playful storytelling, I bring my protagonists into provocative, often dystopian worlds. These works question injustice and reflect on belief systems and power structures that suppress identity, drawing from my own experiences of growing up in rural Wales, dyslexic, outsider, and female in a controlling, misogynistic environment.

I sometimes embody roles such as accused witches, hysterical suffragettes, and frustrated housewives—figures burdened by history but rich with emotion. I channel their rage, sadness, and resistance, building emotional tension by combining the feminine with the disturbing: the surreal, the uncanny, the weird. My work is inspired by Eastern European filmmakers who use these same devices to seduce audiences into feeling discomfort and provoke shifts in perception.

I draw from mythology, history, science fiction, and pop culture, working across digital and analogue forms including film, video art, collage, installation, and interactive experience. My collage approach layers imagery, text, archives, found objects, sound, animation, and mark-making to build richly symbolic narratives. In Idleness is a Great Source of Evil, for instance, I fuse stop motion, green screen, live footage, CCTV, and animated collage to explore historical anxieties around women’s visibility and idleness.