https://www.derbyprintopen.org/printmakers/michelle-keegan?fbclid=IwAR3wKrHymPPxyCQoI2U29s9ZWyhiKb5DaEVxnOQ5kbzhPl2c-mm1Enf2BrQ
A Slade School of Art graduate, and winner of the 2014 Flourish Award for excellence in printmaking. Keegan strongly identifies with Romney Marsh, where she spent much of her childhood and adolescence, as her spiritual home, it is a place whose desolate and minimal characteristics continually ‘haunt’ the aesthetic of her work. Her artistic practice conducts conversations with the landscape and reflects on notions of belonging, identity, rootedness, liminality, and ‘home’.
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 she makes on site during her visits to the South. The drawings are then playfully distorted into overlapping layers of line and texture on zinc and copper plates. The etching process becomes one of spontaneous transcription, of feelings and memories, both familiar and elusive, which evolves as she works.
The results are intricate and complex multi-layered prints that resist literal interpretation and lack referential scale. Honouring instead a physically charged and deeply personal mapping of the environment.
Keegan is the Senior Lecturer in Printmaking at the University of Northampton and runs a print workshop in Nottingham.
