Michelle Keegan

Michelle Keegan

Miss

Willing to speak to media

20142022

Research activity per year

Personal profile

Biography

Michelle was brought up on Romney Marsh a desolate corner of Britain on the South East Coast. Michelle studied Fine Art at the Kent Institute of Art and Design [formally Maidstone College of Art] she specialised within Printmaking and a subsidiary in Painting, graduating with First Class Honours.

For her post graduate study, she undertook this at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London between 1998 – 1990, specialising in Printmaking.

Michelle completed a Post Graduate Certificate of Education between 1984-1986 at Nottingham Trent University.

Before joining the University of Northampton, Michelle was the course leader for the Foundation Degree in Fine Art Practice at Nottingham College (formally Central College) responsible for delivery and management of Fine Art.

In 2015 Michelle became a Fellow of the The Higher Education Academy.

Michelle’s practice has always been predominately within the discipline of Printmaking.

Research Interests

Since winning the 2014 Flourish Award for Excellence within Printmaking Michelle has undertaken three research residencies at West Yorkshire Print Workshop around safer and less toxic Printmaking Practices. This has involved the making a series of prints exploring Edinburgh Etch and Ferric Chloride and Copper Sulphate.

Michelle has taught a number of Printmaking master classes at West Yorkshire Print Workshop.

Michelle’s Printmaking Practice is a way in which to conduct conversations with the landscape and reflect on notions of belonging, identity, rootedness, liminality, and ‘home’. The work explores the dynamics and ambiguities of relationships, therefore exposing private ways of seeing and that of wider public discourses. She 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.

Drainage dykes, sea walls, electricity pylons and sound mirrors 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.

Teaching Interests

Michelle is Senior Lecturer in Printmaking at the University of Northampton. She teaches on both our undergraduate courses, BA Fine Art and BA Painting and Drawing and also on the MA Fine Art course.

Michelle is a consummate Printmaker with Teaching and Education being a vocation and a source of reciprocal enjoyment and deep learning.

Education/Academic qualification

Master, Postgraduate Higher Diploma in Fine Art, Slade School of Fine Art, University College London

Award Date: 1 Jul 1990

Bachelor, BA honours 1st class in Fine Art, University for the Creative Arts

Award Date: 21 Jun 1988

PGCE, Post Graduate Certificate of Education, Nottingham Trent University

Award Date: 1 Jul 1986

External positions

Member of Space and Place Practice, http://spaceplacepractice.com/michelle-keegan.html

1 Jan 2020 → …

Guest Tutor, Leicester Print Workshop

Tutor in Printmaking, The Open College of the Arts

Guest Tutor, West Yorkshire Print Workshop

Keywords

  • N Visual arts (General) For photography, see TR
  • Printmaking
  • Etching
  • Silkscreen
  • Drypoint

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