WYPW Exhibition: Michelle Keegan - Still Navigating

West Yorkshire Print Workshop is pleased to announce that our next exhibition- titled ‘Still Navigating’- focuses on the multi-plate etchings of Nottingham-based artist Michelle Keegan. A Slade School of Art graduate, and winner of last year’s Flourish Award- for excellence in printmaking- Michelle will be presenting her minimalist and monochromatic works in not just one, but two Yorkshire-based solo shows this year- at the WYPW gallery this spring, and at Huddersfield Art Gallery in the autumn.

Michelle describes her artistic practise as a way in which to conduct conversations with the landscape and reflect on notions of belonging, identity, rootedness, liminality, and ‘home’. Though Nottingham- where Michelle teaches and runs a small print workshop- is seen as her ‘professional home’, she strongly identifies with Romney Marsh- where she spent much of her childhood and adolescence- as her ‘spiritual home’; it is a place, she says, whose desolate and minimal characteristics continually ‘haunt’ the aesthetic of her work. Drainage dykes, sea walls, and electricity pylons- structures of modernity that
traverse the flat expanses of the marshland- act as departure points for sketches that she makes on site during her visits to the South. These drawings are then playfully distorted into overlapping layers of line and texture on zinc and copper plates, the etching process becoming one of spontaneous transcription- of feelings and memories- both familiar and elusive- which come to her as she works. The results are intricate and complex multi-layered prints that resist literal interpretation and lack referential scale, instead honouring a physically charged and deeply personal mapping of the environment. The collection of works on display at West Yorkshire Print Workshop will additionally serve to demonstrate a high level precision and skill in the medium, and demonstrate an attuned understanding of abstraction.