Michaela Davlyne Wong

A still of a girl - tan, with braided hair and mini gold loop earrings - perched on her elbows over a desert-like textured table, partially obscured by a dried squid suspended in air, a trio of sweet potatoes standing side by side and wrapped in string - all as part of a set she is creating. She is holding a crusty loaf of bread that is wrapped in string and suspended in air, but also balancing on a wooden stick that has a strangely human figure. The image is warm, filled with tones of orange, ochre and pastel pink.

About

Michaela Davlyne Wong is an artist, a researcher, a maker of experiences, a material activist, an avid questioner, a wanderer and wonderer, an explorer, a rebel, a terraformer, a dreamer.

She is intrigued and confused by humanity – especially the relationships humans have with the world, with each other and with themselves. She sees human and human emotion as material, and is particularly excited by the psychologies, tools and frameworks that are consciously and intuitively employed to “ensure” survival: rituals, social structures, home-making, mortality salience, legacy-making, disgust and memory. Her work travels across disciplines but is grounded in narrative and context, in the tactile and experiential, and is always embedded in uncanny harmonies of texture and colour. She is frequently driven to turn the unexpected, repulsive and dismissed into the surprisingly desirable, and playfully toys with dualities and the (in)ability of the human mind to concurrently hold two opposing truths. She believes in playful yet bold provocation, in embracing vulnerability and in unraveling expectations. Her dream is to create work that transforms perspectives and stimulates the disruption of accepted patterns and beliefs, that inspires others to subvert and invent new systems and ways of living and seeing.

Currently, she is on a journey of reconciling her relationship with materials and making, in a world where even existing feels like it takes up too much space.