For Prints’ Sake: Michelle Keegan, Flourish Exhibition

Michelle Keegan is the winner of the 2014 Flourish Award. The Flourish Award was established in 2009 by West Yorkshire Print Workshop to champion and showcase excellence in printmaking across Yorkshire. The award now provides printmakers from across the UK with the opportunity to exhibit their work in a group exhibition at the WYPW Gallery. The winner of the award goes on to present their own solo exhibition at Huddersfield Art Gallery.

Keegan is fascinated by Printmaking, she lives for it and has never ceased to be excited and amazed by its magic and potential. The title of this exhibition comes from her relationship with Printmaking. The process is a fundamental part of the work. The images emerge through allowing the print process of etching and the personality of the metal, on which the images are constructed, to become essential to the visual dialogue. The nature of the process demands clarity of thought, precision and reflection throughout the making process.

Keegan describes her artistic practice as 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.

Keegan teaches and runs a small print workshop in Nottingham, which is 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 whose desolate and minimal characteristics continually ‘haunt’ the aesthetic of her work.

For more information visit http://www.kirklees.gov.uk/museums