Michelle Mayn
Evolving over a three-week period, this work explores feminal life essence through a material-based practice. Installed as an alternating back and forth between each artist, this woman-to-woman exchange provides a reciprocal affect and a resonating response.
Allowing the work to build and form over time acts as a conceptual manifestation of life as a continuous process of formation. Gathering, assembling and connecting, human and non-human, material and non-material underscore the relational nature and cyclical pulse of life.
As a maker, this process-based practice is experienced as being elemental in the universal flow of energy/life force/mauri that breathes life into the material world. In contending life as having no beginning, no end and no separation from the physical and non-physical world, the material calls for our ongoing responsibility because it holds the potential for life.
Michelle Mayn & Lucy Boermans x mothermother 2021
Michelle Mayn holds a Masters of Visual Arts from Auckland University of Technology and has studied Traditional and Contemporary Maori Weaving at Unitec and mixed media at The Art Students League of New York in 2017.
Mayn works primarily with harakeke, New Zealand native flax, using traditional Maori techniques of weaving, binding, twining and knotting; often incorporating found objects. These time intensive methods of gathering, processing and making develop an intimate relationship with material and the natural world. Material, light, form and movement are combined to create ephemeral object-based installations and sculptures that explore the mauri (life force) of materials beyond the world of sense perception.
news
The inaugural edition of TENT will feature live exhibitions across the country and also online, and will take place from Thursday 4 – Sunday 7 November across New Zealand.