Drawn
in the Margins Flourish
Award by Michelle Keegan
Leicester Print Workshop Project Space
3rd May – 30th July 2016
Printmaker
Michelle Keegan is the 2014 winner
of the Flourish Award for Excellence in
Printmaking hosted by West Yorkshire Print Workshop. A Slade School of
Art graduate, Michelle’s work in etching is minimalist and monochromatic,
depicting a series of abstract layers, memories of spaces, places and landscape.
The Flourish award gave Michelle access to the WYPW
studio where she developed this series of new work, entitled Still Navigating, which was first exhibited
as part of a solo print exhibition at
Huddersfield Art Gallery in 2015/6
‘I am fascinated by printmaking,
I live for it and have never ceased to be excited and amazed by its magic and
potential. The process is a fundamental part of my work. The images emerge
through allowing the print process of etching and the personality of the metal,
on which the images are constructed, to become essential to the visual
dialogue. The nature of the process demands clarity of thought, precision and
reflection throughout the making process.’
Michelle describes her artistic practice as a way in which to conduct
conversations with the landscape and reflect on notions of belonging, identity,
rootedness, liminality, and ‘home’.
Michelle teaches and runs a small print workshop in Nottingham, which is
her professional home, but strongly identifies with Romney Marsh, where she
spent much of her childhood and adolescence, as a spiritual home, a place whose
desolate and minimal characteristics continually ‘haunt’ the aesthetic of her
work.
‘Drainage dykes, sea walls, and electricity
pylons are structures of modernity that traverse the flat expanses of the
marshland. These act as departure points for sketches that I make on site
during visits to the South. The drawings are then playfully distorted into
overlapping layers of line and texture on zinc and copper plates.’
The results are intricate and complex multi-layered prints, which act as
physically charged and deeply personal maps of the environment.
