Michael Lowe
installation
The Wagon
Cuba St
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Light + Sound Exhibition
LUX Festival Wellington 2017
The Wagon mysteriously appears in its setting as though it was dredged from the ocean floor or some other parallel realm.
How did it get there? What is it carrying?
Nestled inside the boot of the wagon sits a portal to another microcosm. A gentle shifting aurora invites visitors to circumnavigate, touch, and examine the precious and peculiar cargo carrier. Shimmering fragments of light glisten and abstract shapes pulsate in time with a deep bass echo, uniting the movement of the animation.
Bring your face to the glass and peer through a window opening. Feel the heartbeat through your hands and body pressed against the vehicle. Embrace an otherworldly sense of serenity as you lose yourself in the depths of the Wagon’s catch.
Urban ‘light and sound’ public space installation within a car parked on the footpath (several parking tickets received).
Bottomless Skip
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Exhibition at Depot Artspace 2022
Ecologies of Scale - A group exhibition which sheds light on the current housing crisis in Tāmaki Makaurau
Image credits @llenyd
The architecture and interior design disciplines are part of a construction industry responsible for large portions of global waste and CO2 emissions. Yet, they continue to fuel a real estate marketing system that manipulates and seduces us to be self-conscious of trend cycles that exacerbate profiteering through ‘property investment’ for capital gains.
We’ve become obsessed with re-modelling and ’sprucing up’ our houses, bathrooms and kitchens. More often using poor quality materials that can’t be re-used beyond their ever-shortening life span. It’s a superficial pillar comparable to that of ’fast fashion’ and is pulling society in the opposite direction of a carbon zero future.
The rubbish skip is the antithesis of a sustainable circular economy.
There is a climate emergency and we need to reduce our consumption of materials. We need to be more creative and adaptive with what we have. Fix broken things. Learn to live 'off-trend' and embrace an imperfect and eclectic style. Every object made has an environmental cost, material waste, a toxicity level, and an energy, water and carbon footprint.
How could you be more resourceful in your next home project? Our choices will make a difference.
The Swing
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Play intervention |
Wellington Sculpture Trust
Parking Day 2018
(Wellington Sculpture Trust Judges Award)
Designed with Studiopacific architecture
The city has become so serious...
Where is the swing you loved as a child?
Where is the swing you love today?
For one day that year The Swing occupied a car park in central Wellington and invited the public to re-occupy the street through play, lift their spirit and elevate their senses.
Subconscious
landscape
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These unique works are the by-product of my painting process. I created them over many years by cleaning brushes between paint strokes while painting the array of landscapes featured in this website.
I wanted to honour this humble fabric debris by reconstructing it in a new format that celebrates the beauty of the subconscious painting process that is alive within the
artworks’ surface.
I invite you into my painter’s chair to take a glimpse into a private and administrative aspect of a painting’s evolution.
