Michael Needham
In Remembrance
1 - 22 February 2014
In Remembrance by Michael Needham is an exhibition of new sculptural work exploring uncanny sensibilities around the visual language of loss. Visibly influenced by an Australia Council residency at the British School in Rome (2012), this is a series of enshrined objects, arranged in the assumed order of classical display, lined up on stone-like plinths. Yet these propositional artefacts equally celebrate uncertainty of form, drawing from the realm of the unconscious and echoing indeterminate contours of the self. Here, a mirrored physicality of the viewer is also proposed, presenced as strange relic, detached, morphed, materialised into object.
Michael Needham is a Melbourne based visual artist and lecturer in Fine Art at Monash and Australian Catholic Universities. His practice primarily incorporates sculptural installation, drawing and architectural intervention. Among other things, Needham’s work explores myth, belief and residual melancholia in the contemporary psyche. Recent exhibitions have probed a relationship between representation and death through a visual and spatial exploration of body-space and trace.
