Michelle Keegan
You Will Never Know How Happy I Am
27 March – 11 May 2024
Free entry
“St Augustine says, the dead are invisible, they are not absent. You needn't believe in ghosts to see that's true. We carry the genes and the culture of our ancestors, and what we think about them shapes what we think of ourselves, and how we make sense of our time and place. Are these good times, bad times, interesting times? We rely on history to tell us. History, and science too, help us put our small lives in context. But if we want to meet the dead looking alive, we turn to art”
Michelle Keegan responded to LPW’s Suzanne Balkanyi’s etching plate archive and produced over 100 recalibrated abstract prints which question notions of authorship and how the unintentional and overlooked marks on the back of the plates could represent and commemorate a presence, practice and person.
Suzanne Balkanyi’s work is highly illustrative and the selection of plates at LPW comes from her work as a zoological illustrator at the Paris Zoo. The archive resonated strongly with Keegan's own practice exploring memorialisation and loss and she was curious about collaborating with the physical remnants of an artist's practice to produce contemporary prints in honour of both practices.
Keegan embraced the etching plates as palimpsests, holding printmaking secrets which are rarely seen. These new prints build new narratives in conversation with Balkanyi's originals etchings.
Artist Biography
Michelle’s practice uses printmaking processes to explore how we connect to landscapes to reflect on notions of belonging, identity, rootedness, liminality and home, and how this is mediated through subjective relationships and wider socio-political systems. The desolate flat landscapes, disrupted by drainage dykes, sea walls and electricity pylons, of Michelle’s adolescent home Romney Marsh continue to haunt her work. The experimental, playful and uncertain nature of the printmaking process allows memories and geographical politics to be transcribed into the artwork to produce a complex personal mapping of her relationship to these sites, which resists literal interpretations and referential scale. Michelle Keegan studied Fine Art at the Kent Institute of Art and Design, graduating with first class honours. Michelle continued her post graduate education at the Slade School of Fine Art. She has made Prints and exhibited widely for the past 25 years, she is the Senior Lecturer in Printmaking at the University of Northampton and tutor for Printmaking at Open College of Arts. Michelle is also a guest tutor at numerous Print Workshops.
