Michaela Pegum:
All is Intimate
Michaela Pegum’s All is Intimate is showing Wednesday 11 – Monday 23 September, 2024, at @14 Gallery, 14 Langridge St, Collingwood VIC, with sound by Dominic Redfern.
Michaela Pegum, All is Intimate I, 2021, copper and silver electroformed organza and satin, 150 x 100 x 160 mm. Photo: Matthew Stanton. Courtesy the artist
LW: You discuss the term ‘threshold’ environments in your research. What fascinates you about these realms?
MP: I am very interested in the way specific environments have a powerful effect on us. For as long as I can remember I’ve felt drawn to what I describe as ‘threshold’ environments, these being places that encompass a stretch between two contrasting realms or atmospheres. Here, a liminal region opens up between the familiar and the unknown, and I find this is a very rich and interesting space. Within this project, I looked at dusk as a temporal threshold between light and dark and the desert as a spatial threshold between the earth and its atmosphere. I spent much time exploring the feelings and sensations experienced within these complex liminal fields. I am particularly interested in the stretch of encounter with the land and the atmosphere that is felt before we frame it with words, which is where my interest also lies with artmaking. There is a deep intimacy possible in this space that opens up quite different dimensions of experience to those we are normally immersed in in the Modern West.
LW: The desert landscape and its extremes of light, temperature, and unique non-human ecosystem offers rich potential for investigation. What is it about the atmosphere of the arid landscape that excites you and specifically informs your practice?
MP: I have found that threshold environments encourage an openness in our sensory and perceptive experience that allows a plethoric sense of life to become known to us. This sits in contrast to ‘ordinary’ experiences, where we might territorialise a space where we can organise our thoughts around more practical matters of living. In the vastness of the desert, alone and isolated from any markers of human existence, I have the wind, the ancient mineral forms under my feet, the whispering vegetation, and a sense of the seeming endlessness of the earth contracting in the infinite expanse of blue space beyond it. The different scales of time and space and the vast networking of this environment as a concert of organisms, atmospheres, substances, colours, light and sound have a profoundly transformative effect on my state of being. In my experience, it is both awe-inspiring and profoundly relieving to feel how we, as animals on the earth, are a part of this very beautiful, complex and nuanced continuum of life. For this body of work, I explored the nuances of embodied experience within this environment and the ways in which our state of being is affected by its uncontainable vastness and energetic potential. I spent a lot of time creating evocative textures as a way of developing a sensorial language in material. I also explored how materials and forms could embody a mercuriality that resisted identification and categorisation, and in doing so, allowed a sense of potential and richness to remain and resonate, both in the form and in the space, they leave open for the viewer to intuit into.
LW: Your practice isn’t a literal depiction of the landscape; is it more about your intuitive and sensory response to a location or place? How do you work with this sense of encounter?
MP: I work in intuitive and sensorial ways in my practice; for me, there is a clear resonance between this space and the immersive space in which I connect with the natural world. Through my immersive encounters with landscape, I developed something of an embodied repository of sensorial resources that are expressed in my artmaking, but not in literal or illustrative ways. These affective experiences in the natural world unconsciously circulate into my work through what feels like a resonance of sensation or an excess of feeling, and they seem to flow out in their own ways into my encounters with material. As my work developed, I realised that rather than making artworks that referenced the environment, I was exploring the kinds of felt intuitive and sensory processes that are shared across the liminal zones of encounter within both landscape and artmaking. What I was actually investigating was a state of being that was common to both these spaces. Within the transformational space that opens up in these encounters, where one might feel changed by interacting with landscape or artwork, one passes through a liminal space of unknowing, which I feel is key to these experiences of change and growth. It is within this embodied unknowing that I situate my work. So, my artworks do resonate with the intuitive and sensory dynamics of these experiences in liminal environments, but they do so through their distinctive means.
LW: You seem to deeply immerse yourself in the environment and, through your keen sense of observation, highlight aspects of this encounter in specific, holistic ways. Is this expression of the ‘interconnectedness of all things at the core of your art practice?
MP: I am particularly interested in highlighting and activating spaces of becoming, the connective spaces or channels that emerge between human and non-human entities, substances, and atmospheres. In my work, I try to slow down in this space to understand its nuances, textures, insights, and flows. For me, feeling into this place of deep relationship generates an embodied understanding of our coherence and connection with all of life, from a macro to a metaphysical level. I think it is probably true that this essential understanding exists as a bedrock for my practice. I find it profoundly moving, and I’m very drawn to exploring the different ways it might emerge, not so much as an idea but as an experience, as something understood in the meat of the heart.
LW: You have developed some ground-breaking hybrid materials and processes. Can you expand on the evolution of some of these technological and artistic innovations?
MP: I began this research wanting to find a way to hold a sense of becoming in material. This was how I started developing hybrid materials. These comprise a meshing of two different substances that hover within the process of affecting and transforming one another. I developed these materials through the process of copper electroforming, where microscopic particles of copper are gradually transferred and grown into one object from another via electrochemical processes. I was attracted to this technology as an expression of life force, growth and relationship. I experimented with it over many years to develop ways to grow copper into the soft fibres of textiles. Here, I was combining a humanly constructed material that was fragile, delicate and skin-like with a substance from the earth that exists in trace quantities in our bodies and has a great potential for density and strength. This new material is an integration of two substances, hovering in tension between them both. The electroforming process is quite a complex system with dynamic vitality. It is mercurial, unpredictable, challenging, and surprising, and this is of great value to me. In creating with it, I am collaborating with a technological entity that has its own volition, so my practice involves something more than me. It is always pulling me beyond my ideas into new territory.
LW: You come from a jewellery (gold and silversmithing) background - I have been captivated to see your work evolving materially and in scale, becoming more sculptural to form works that could be described as interconnected ‘living ecologies’. How did this body of work evolve.
MP: My work has evolved into sculptural objects as I felt a growing drive to have the pieces expand in form and explore how they could be encountered spatially. I also wanted the work to develop without prescribing its resulting form. The sculptural series All is Intimate and Unseen are the most recently made in this body of work, and they almost seemed to build themselves like living ecologies. None of the pieces were designed; they developed as a language of parts that slowly found ways to interrelate and build into more complex forms over many months. To me, it felt like tending living things; the role of my hand was light, and I needed to slip back into a state of unknowing to let the wisdom of the materials and forms come forward and evolve in the ways they needed to.
LW: When I view your new works, Michaela, I experience a unique visual language – a poetic sense of the intangible ‘made real’. Are these qualities that you consciously seek to express in your work?
MP: It feels foundational and important to me, to begin with the felt and granular details of where we meet the world. This is how I feel closest to it, and perhaps at its heart, my practice is an endeavour to know the world more deeply and to understand what is not yet clear or visible to me but is felt in some way. I would describe this as an instinct or a deep curiosity more than a conscious directive. My background in dance has undoubtedly contributed to or strengthened this approach to the world, as I grew up dancing, and it also involves negotiation with what the body feels but cannot see. Practices that work within this realm materialise a kind of alchemical tension between the distinctions of established ‘reality’ and the possibilities of the imagination, where they meet and transform one another. I have found Sensing the intangible or the felt space between things can open up different ways of knowing, and drawing this through material allows me to see what this ‘knowing’ is.
Michaela Pegum, Entangle, 2022, copper electroformed velvet, silver, bronze, artificial leather, timber, 1370 mm long x 800 mm high x 605 mm wide. Photo: Matthew Stanton. Courtesy the artist
Michaela Pegum, Unseen I, 2022, copper electroformed satin and velvet, 165 x 185 x 155 mm. Photo: Matthew Stanton. Courtesy the artist
Michaela Pegum, Bodies Blooms, 2022, copper and silver electroformed organza and satin, terracotta, wood ash, silk, silver, shibuichi, bamboo, Yakisugi cedar table (construction by Simon Wightwick) - Japanese cedar, Himalayan cedar, 950 mm long x 430 mm high x 600 mm wide. Photo: Matthew Stanton. Courtesy the artist
