Background

Tracey originally trained in Metalwork and Jewellery, completing her BA at Loughborough College of Art in 1997 and then her MA at the Royal College of Art in 1999. While studying for her MA her work transitioned to a sculptural practice focused on adornment, which evolved into the making of fragile sculptural forms concerned with the body, exploring the ephemerality of our embodiment.

In the years that followed, Tracey established roles as a college lecturer in art and design, and lecturer in critical and theoretical studies. During this time the growing desire to make work that would survive time rather than be undone by it, drew Tracey towards stone as a material that could literally and figuratively become solid ground to work with  and from.

In 2009 Tracey began learning to carve stone with the expert guidance of Alan Micklethwaite, which continued as an informal apprenticeship and the development of Micklethwaite Studios in Driffield, East Yorkshire, in 2016. From these studios they work both together and separately on public and private stone carving, sculpture and letter carving commissions as well as on their individual artistic practice and teaching.

In recent years Tracey's work has oscillated between a delicacy created with wire, sheet metal, wax and flower petals, and a monumentality and steady presence particular to the carving of letters and form in stone, with current work gradually weaving these two strands of sensibility together.