Michaela Pegum
Meshes with wind and light
2018
photograph of performance, Vulkathunha-Gammon Ranges National Park
Photographer: Dave Meagher
Mutual bloom I (component), Nudlamutuna Hill
2018
silk, copper
100 x 110 x 100 mm (approx)
Photographer: Michaela Pegum
Mutual bloom I
2019
terracotta, wood ash, silk, copper
165 x 110 x 100 mm (approx)
Photographer: Matthew Stanton
Research Abstract
Subtle bodies: Corporeal and material becoming in threshold landscapes
Subtle bodies is an intimate, embodied enquiry into empathic and transcorporeal relationships with threshold landscapes. The research spans the continuum from lived experience to artistic practice and manifests in the creation of sculptural, wearable and image based artworks and their considered spatial presence in an installation environment. Within the project I examine the resonance of my work from its deeply embodied, personal and poetic elements to its ethical and political implications within the spheres of ecological studies, biosemiotics and posthumanism.
The specific environments I have developed relationships with are liminal in character and include the temporal threshold of dusk and the spatial threshold of the South Australian desert. These particular landscapes and atmospheres have a gravity that draws me towards their liminal, transforming qualities, provoking an openness that loosens the frameworks of my ‘ordinary’ perceptions that are to varying degrees structured by the forces of the political and cultural environment of my upbringing — including advanced capitalism, anthropocentrism and Cartesian binarism. My research investigates these lesser trodden territories of sensed experience and their potential for deepening our relational field.
My studio research involves working in highly explorative ways to develop material languages that are liminal, suggestive and sensory. A primary aspect of this research has involved creating unique hybrid materials through processes of growing copper into textile fibres — creating materials and forms that are suspended in states of growth and transformation or ‘becoming’.
Through exploring the ephemeral and material networking of human and non-human life forms and other elements of landscape such as metals, minerals and atmospheres, this project draws to focus the intimate, evolutionary potentials inherent in our relationships with our surroundings, exploring the ‘becoming’ that coheres us within what seems to lie beyond us and the liminal spaces of un-knowing that allow these transformations to unfold.
Bio
Michaela works within the realms of sculpture and wearable art and has a history in somatics and contemporary dance that informs her material practice. Her work is an exploration of felt experience, garnered through the deeply embodied and poetic relationships we form with the natural world. With an interest in liminal environments, and traversing the spaces of landscape and studio, she investigates the affective qualities, tones and temporalities that constitute the fabric of relations between the sensing being and their environment. The resonance of this relational space is considered in her practice from its deeply embodied, personal and poetic elements to its ethical and political implications.
In the studio Michaela works in highly explorative ways to develop material languages and forms that are liminal, suggestive and sensory, often creating unique hybrid materials through the integration of metals and textiles through growing processes. She further investigates the relational potentials between art form and beholder through the considered crafting and choreography of their shared physical and atmospheric spaces.
She is the recipient of a number of awards including the National Contemporary Jewellery Award, the Victorian Craft Awards — Lynne Kosky Jewellery Encouragement Award, the Fresh! Pieces of Eight Award, and the Contemporary Wearables Student Prize. She was selected for Schmuck in Munich, Germany and the Marzee International Graduate Show in the Netherlands and has exhibited both locally and internationally in Europe and Asia.