About

Tracie Peisley

What it is to be human…passionate, poetic and wanting to attach to others Peisley pulls the viewer into personal dialogue. Through imagery and form her work cuts to a symbolic resonance that hits the back of the psyche to cause a sometimes awkward acknowledgement about oneself. Through a relentless process of stripping artifice from her own ordinary reality, she feels that she captures emotion that couldn’t be constellated in anyway but poetry or art. A woman wanting to make sense of the existential loneliness we find ourselves in, wanting to make sincere relational connections and speak compassionately from lived experience.

Her travels in her pre therapy years in Europe, Africa and America have inspired her. Her work with it’s strong personal narrative draws on Picasso, Louise Bourgeois and Kiki Smith, Outsider artists and the Ancient art of Greece.

On leaving Art School in 1989, working as a play therapist and clerk summarising patients notes for a doctors surgery highlighted to her the importance of having one’s story heard and acknowledged. That the holder of this information held the keys to someone’s well-being. Her openness in her work is courageous, attempts to track the similarities between us, common experiences of love, loss and grief are all there in her work.

Studying Art Therapy liberated her to work in different modalities and trust an intuitive process led by her unconscious. The training validated the significance of authentic expression to tell her truth which speaks to universal truths.

In 2003 at Hertfordshire she began to use ceramic, exploring themes of intimacy and female potency. She continued to develop her bright and lyrical style and applied it to build a portfolio of work in porcelain, alongside a deepening understanding of psychology, her own madness and therapeutic benefits of relating through art.

Peisley is a prolific and serious and playful Artist, shifting through series or bodies of work she circles he self, honing her skills and providing us with rich psychologically loaded material which has been gently metabolised by her constant study.

Delighting in ‘not knowing’ and being innocent to process, she uses media with a freedom and maturity rarely seen. To be immersed in her work is an experience, to see a part is a still from a longer narrative. You won’t see more of the same but a thread of her distinctive style can be felt throughout. Visiting her social media pages gives a sense of the breadth of this Artist.