Upcoming exhibition: A line that was not - Mikaela Marshall

Media release – 24 March, 2017

A line that was not
Mikaela Marshall

Exhibition Preview: Wednesday 29 March at 5.30pm

Exhibition Runs: Thursday 30 March – Sunday 30 April 2017

Artist talk with Mikaela Marshall: Thursday 30 March at 5.30pm

Image: Photograph of Tuam Street and High Street intersection overlaid with a drawing from ‘Stage Patterns’ series, pen on butter paper, 2017

A line that was not continues Mikaela Marshall’s open-ended exploration of movement, meaning, and form. Using The Physics Room's inner city setting for her exploration of point-to-point connection, the exhibition maps everyday interactions around the High Street and Tuam Street intersection. By a process of translation - where movement becomes line - her drawings become the distilled record of anonymous movements.

For this new body of work, Marshall has taken her practice outside of familiar, interior spaces and moved from working with people that she knows to anonymous participants. Through these shifts, her process is subtly reshaped to present a flattened transliteration of how we navigate the inner city.

Marshall’s work draws on the vast reservoir of unnoticed, trivial, and repetitive actions which make up the common ground of daily life. Her drawings function in a space between and beyond documentation; exposing the movements of anonymous participants to sculptural scrutiny. By attempting to document a succession of instances these works approach the impossibility of embedding movement as a text or diagram, thereby freeing the line from its representational responsibility. As such, her work is a personal meditation on the point at which a gestural act, like drawing or walking, embodies a conscious act.

Mikaela Marshall is a Christchurch based artist, who recently completed a MFA at Ilam School of Fine Art. Mikaela's interdisciplinary, and process-based art practice is centred upon movement, meaning and form.

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