Michelle Keegan
I am a Printmaker and Lecturer.
I am in Transit. I live and work in numerous places and drive up and down the motorways. It’s a liminal existence. I collect imagery when on Romney Marsh that informs a visual conversation. It is a desolate, peripheral place.
I will make numerous visits to a location in different seasons, weather and light. The repetitive fieldwork enables the place to be revealed alongside a broader context for the work. These initial sketches act as departure points for more complex ideas and a remapping of my journeys. They are the basis for ideas and multi layered conversations about how we navigate place and space.
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.