Tracy Satchwill
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 childhood experience.
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.
