Tracy Satchwill
As a teenager, while reading Brave New World, I recognised a society that wielded immense power to control, oppress, and manipulate, alongside figures who sought to rebel against that system. This early awareness of power and resistance has remained central to my practice, which holds a long-standing attention to women’s lived experiences, particularly those shaped by erasure, suppression, and silence.
My work is driven by women’s inner worlds and emotional states. Drawing on my experiences of growing up in rural Wales as an outsider, I have developed a sensitivity to marginalisation, belonging, and voice. The work often begins by listening for what has been carried, endured, or left unresolved.
I create immersive, tactile installations that hold space for women’s presence and forms of feminine power that have been obscured or misread. Passive or idealised representations of femininity are disrupted through the use of the surreal, the uncanny, and the strange. Viewers are invited to enter these environments and sit with tension, presence, and power rather than observe from a distance.
Working across installation, drawing, collage, film, sound, and sculpture, I bring these media together through a layered, collage-based approach. I enjoy overlaying materials such as paint, text, texture, and archival elements, allowing the work to unfold through analogue processes. In my recent installation A Gallus Un, this approach took the form of working directly onto calico fabric using accumulated marks, objects, and surface treatments.
More recently, my practice has shifted toward reclaiming and reawakening forms of feminine power through symbolism, folklore, ritual, and speculative storytelling. Reading around Palaeolithic and Neolithic cultures has deepened my interest in belief systems, material traces, and feminine presence embedded in objects, spaces, and landscapes.
I am interested in how bodies move through space and how materials carry memory. My installations are made to be entered, sensed, and engaged with, offering an invitation to feel, rather than to conclude.
