Connecting with Place: Fantasy by Mkticks Celebrates the Australian Landscape.

Michelle Kar is an emerging maker, artist and registered architect working out of Booroo/ Perth under the moniker mkticks. Through their practice, the artist seeks to convey the essence of a feeling often around themes of nature, animals, landscapes and colours.

For their latest exhibition, Fantasy, Michelle focused on the Darling Scarp, a low escarpment in Western Australia and looked to articulate their own experience in relation to it through a combination of mediums to capture, as Michelle puts it: “a sense of grand vastness and darkness from afar, amongst moments of bright colour and soft textures up close.”

Michelle interprets these dichotomies of scale through detail; line, stroke and etching and an overall effect; abstract shapes, colour blocking and composition. Much like a mental “fantasy” of a place, the artworks capture skewed memories and foggy personal recollections—like a wet, soggy walk amongst leaf litter or a silvery, linear fog outline slithering along the mountaintop as seen from a back verandah. The exhibition celebrates personal connections to local places and space and the act of moving intentionally through the landscape.

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“I hope the visitor will lay their head to rest that night and enjoy a cacophony of dreams inspired by these abstract images mixed with their own individual connections and memories,” Michelle continues.

The exhibition features both original prints and woven blankets. The woven blankets are direct representations of the artworks in textile form. Michelle professionally scanned the original artworks and reinterpreted them with a machine that has a restricted amount of thread colours—creating a new version of the image beyond their control. The intention of the exercise is to see whether the essence of the original artwork can be further distilled and enhanced afresh or whether it takes on a new form when applied to a new medium, surface and context.

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[Images courtesy of Michelle Kar. Photography by Aaron Webber.]