This Must Be The Place is a new series of public lectures that takes its title from the 1983 Talking Heads song, a song that was unusual in their catalogue as a love song to place and home. The talks series broadly looks at how contemporary artists have used site and location as frameworks for research, installation and theme. Talks are live and in person and held in the RHA Friends Room on Thursday evenings. The series will feature artist talks by Ciara Roche, Fiona Whelan, Dominique Crowley, Alan James Burns and Michelle Malone and will continue in 2023.
This talk concludes this series this year and will continue in 2023.
Artist bio:
Michelle Malone is awardee of a project studio in Temple Bar Gallery and studios 2021-2022. In addition she was awarded the Golden Fleece Award 2022, Visual Art Bursary 2021, Agility Award 2021, RDS Whyte’s Award 2020, Mont Kavanagh Fine Art Graduate Scholarship 2020, Fire Station Artist Studio’s Graduate Development Award 2020, John Creagh Student of Excellence Award 2020. She is a recent graduate of the Master of Art in Fine Art programme from Technological University Dublin and she graduated with first class honours. She currently works part time as a Senior Research assistant in Tu Dublin working on an Erasmus + project. DICO; Digital Career Stories using Fine Art and media based methodologies for digital career storytelling from 2021-2023.
Michelle Malone’s current exhibition O, to have a little house curated by Sheena Barrett is showing in the LAB Gallery on Foley until November 5th 2022. In addition Michelle Malone is shortlisted for this year RDS visual art awards and will be exhibiting in a group show curated by Aideen Barry in the RDS in October 2022. Her work was included in this years RHA Annual exhibition 2022, in a group show titled You breathe differently down here curated by Amanda Coogan in Droicht Gallery and in a group exhibition Golden Fleece, 21 Years an Exhibition curated by Aisling Prior in the Solstice Art Centre. Michelle Malone hosted her master graduate exhibition Great Uncle Joe from her graduate studio in TBG+S in 2021 and additionally she self-organised a solo exhibition of her undergraduate work tilted Summer Project 1997 in The Complex in 2020 as her grad show was cancelled due to covid-19.
Michelle Malone’s practice is based on her experience growing up in a variety of social housing systems in inner City Dublin, mainly Oliver Bond flats. Her multi-disciplinary installations are comprised of sculpture, image-making, oral histories, audio, and text. Her current practice seeks to give material voice to working class histories from the perspective of lived experience. By bringing together materials, objects, images, and stories in an installation context her work creates a space for discussion and reflection. It is her belief that it is much needed in this industry to let working-class people tell their own story. She also believes all materials are biased and that objects have a collectively known cultural value. It is her intention to instrumentalise and weaponise the shared meaning of materials and objects to visually tell working-class histories and to create an embodied empathy/identity for the subject matter.
Image: Michelle Malone, O, to have a little house, The LAB Gallery September – November 2022, Photo credit by Louis Haugh.