Michelle Keegan is Senior Lecturer in Printmaking the University of Northampton. Michelle is also a guest tutor at numerous Print Workshops and printmaking tutor for Open College of Arts. She is a member of the academic research network Space Place Practice.
A Slade School of Art graduate, and winner of the 2014 Flourish Award for excellence in printmaking, Keegan describes her artistic practice as a way in which to conduct conversations with landscape and reflect on notions of belonging, identity, rootedness, liminality, and ‘home’. The work explores the dynamics and ambiguities of relationships. The work evolves around a discourse of conversations lost. Of people we have lost. Of conversations we never had. The things we wished we’d said. Elusive ghosts of place and deep-seated memories are made present. A more private curious, dislocation of place. A place for listening. A place of belonging. A personal cartography.
Printmaking is essential to the work; it is symbiotic with the idea. The etching process and materiality of Printmaking becomes a spontaneous transcription of feelings and memories, both familiar and elusive. 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.
