Michaela McManus

I’m a visual artist and co-director of Dornoch Street Studios in Glasgow. My practice takes an interdisciplinary approach spanning across film, painting and collage and drawing inspiration from the uncanny, the memory image and our human relationship to domestic space. Instagram: @michaelam.art

My process of making pieces together a selection of memories, dreams and ideas like a collage, creating works which are surreal yet familiar. With this construction of space, I explore the relationship between the flatness of the graphic image and the emotive qualities of gestural painting marks. Somewhere between the inaccessible and the non-existent, I use the imagined landscape to represent the psychological space where memories are retraced and consequently imagined through a process of displacement.

Central motifs include windows, doors and unidentifiable figures, often focusing on domestic and transitional space to explore themes surrounding the uncanny.

This selection of work was made in the past year through-out lockdown. I have been passing the time by stripping my practice back to basics and creating a series of pencil drawings and mono-prints in response to our current day-to-day lives. The drawings bring a dark humoured and tongue-in-cheek approach to situations and objects that have become part of our 'new normal’, depicting mundane situations in a surreal light.

What would you like people to take away from your work?

A lot of my work is visually surreal and warrants an uncanny resemblance, so sometimes it doesn’t always read with a linear narrative. If my work reminds the viewer of a distant memory; a place they’ve been, an interaction they’ve had or even a song they’ve listened to, for me it is a success. I like it when people can relate to my work on different levels of personal experience whether it makes sense or not.

If you could collaborate with anyone who would it be?

I would love the chance to collaborate with a filmmaker, even if it’s using their work in my creative process to produce a 2D visual outcome. If I could collaborate with anyone at all it would be David Lynch or Andrei Tarkovsky - their approach to narrative and visual storytelling has always been a huge influence on my practice.

Where do you draw inspiration from?

I’m inspired by the process of archiving as I’ve always had a fascination with old family photographs and video. There’s something satisfying about picking up a photograph and trying to piece together details to make sense of the situation. I’m always thinking about how this affects the way we remember things and how these images become detached from reality through a process of displacement.

Can you list a couple other creatives/friends/people you look to for inspiration?

Creatives I’m Inspired by : Thomas Hillan (@t.c.hillan), Ryan Hughes (@ryanhughes.textiles)