Two women, five locations, two thousand bricks, one working week. Wall Work is a five-day performance in which Michaela Gleave and Kate Mitchell will build and then dismantle a wall, brick by brick, every day over five consecutive days. Occupying five major public and pedestrian zones in Melbourne’s CBD, Wall Work intervenes into the urban environment, blurring the lines between art and labour and altering our use and perception of the city landscape.
About the artist/s:
Michaela Gleave
Michaela Gleave is a visual artist living and working in Sydney, Australia. Her practice concerns the physicality of sensorial perception, and frequently centres on naturally occurring, everyday phenomena that test the boundaries of perceptual experience. Working with materials such as cloud, light, rain and ice within constructed, architectural spaces, Gleave’s often-illusory installations hover at the junction between art and science, operating between the spaces of personal experience and global understanding. Returning repeatedly to the atmosphere and global airspace as the site for her work, Gleave’s installations and interventions question the relationship we have with our surroundings, allowing us to experience the processes by which we comprehend reality and rethink our presence within it.
Gleave was born in central Australia in 1980 before moving to North-West Tasmania as a child. She holds a MFA in Sculpture, Performance and Installation from the College of Fine Arts, UNSW (2007), and a BFA (Honours First Class) from the School of Art, Hobart, UTAS (2003). Gleave has been awarded a Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship to facilitate a research program in Iceland, Berlin and Central Australia during 2010 and was recently awarded an Australia Council for the Arts New Work grant. In 2008 Gleave completed a directorship at Firstdraft Gallery and is currently on the board of runway magazine as well as being a member of the dialogue-based collective The Free Association. Recent exhibitions include: Primavera 09 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2009); Snowdrift (solo) at MOP Projects, Sydney (2009); Game is Good at Firstdraft Gallery, Sydney (2009); Membrane at Federation Square, Melbourne as part of the Next Wave Festival (2008); and Constructing Space: Experiments in Light (solo) at Tin Sheds Gallery, Sydney (2007).
Kate Mitchell
Kate Mitchell was born in 1982 in Sydney, Australia. She currently lives and works in Sydney. In 2006, she received First Class Honours for her Bachelor of Fine Arts (Photomedia) from the College of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales and completed a Masters of Fine Arts in 2008 at the same institution.
Mitchell adopts performance, video, sculptural elements and drawings to explore the power of the human mind to will ideas into existence; explores the physical limits of the body and the mind through rigorous actions and is driven by a desire to make reality, a particular space of the imagination which belongs to childhood reverie.
Her work encourages the audience to embark upon a quest/direction of no meaning, a journey towards greater comfort and awareness of the paradox. Her work aims to invite comedy, absurdity and slapstick into the viewers experience and to bring about an awareness of being in the body.
Exhibitions include: The Night of the Sunglasses, Manzara Perspectives, Istanbul Turkey (2009), Don’t Touch My Rocks, Chalk Horse (2009), The Horn of Plenty: excess and reversibility, Para-Site, Hong Kong (2009), Urban Screenings, Federation Square, Melbourne (2008), Art & About – By George Australia Square, Sydney (2008), Looking Out, (collaboration with Marley Dawson), Macquarie University, Sydney, ICollect The Australian Museum, Canberra (2006), Foil Awards, Little More Gallery, Omotesando, Tokyo (2004).
