Michaela Gleave is an Australian artist based in Bediagal/Wangal country, Sydney. Gleave’s conceptual practice spans numerous mediums and platforms including digital and online works, installation, performance, photography, sculpture, and video. Gleave’s work has been presented extensively across Australia as well as in Germany, Greece, The United Kingdom, Austria, South Africa, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, Iceland, the United States and Mexico. She has developed major performance and installation works for the MCA, Sydney; GOMA, Brisbane; Dark Mofo, Hobart; AGWA, Perth; Bristol Biennial, UK; TarraWarra Art Museum, Melbourne; Carriageworks, Sydney; and Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne among others. Gleave has been awarded residencies at the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York City, Tokyo Wonder Site in Japan, and CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science, Australia.

Tell us about your experience with ANAT SPECTRA.

As part of ANAT SPECTRA 2018 I presented the performance project A Galaxy of Suns, in collaboration with composer Amanda Cole, programmer Warren Armstrong and astrophysicist Michael Fitzgerald. A Galaxy of Suns is a 36-part choral performance and associated smart phone app that ‘sings’ the stars in real-time, for any location on Earth.  The work approaches the Earth as a giant, spinning music box, sonifying the stars as they pass over the horizon.  The rhythm of the work is entirely dictated by the movement of the stars, and the pitch mapped to their colour, which is an indication of size, age, and chemical composition.  It has been a wonderful work to develop and perform, and the performances are always magical.

A Galaxy of Suns has been presented numerous times and is always adapted site-specifically to its location.  We’ve performed in a 500m long former rail tunnel in the UK, a 1920’s town hall in regional NSW, amidst industrial buildings at the port in Hobart, and against the backdrop of the Glass House Mountains in Queensland.  For ANAT SPECTRA we performed in the spectacular Freemason’s Hall in Adelaide, which inspired a different set of outcomes for the work.  36 singers were arranged in a circle in the pillared entrance hall, illuminated from within, their backs to the audience.  The natural acoustics of the building meant we were able to perform the work un-miked, which was amazing.  It was a wonderful context to respond to and made for quite a special performance of the work.

What or who inspires you in the realm of interdisciplinary practice, and why?

In my practice I look to the edges of human experience and understanding, exploring the systems and structures through which we make sense of the world.  Science is a key reference for me.  The quest for knowledge that drives me as an artist isn’t dissimilar to that of a scientist, though I’m notably approaching reality from a very different point of view and seeking different outcomes as a result.  In my work I try to connect audiences with the greater forces at play in the universe, reaching for perspectives that extend beyond the human, while still acknowledging that our viewpoint is inescapably grounded in our humanity.  I am particularly drawn to the space of the sky for its beauty, majesty, mystery, and inaccessibility.  The sky has been a canvas for the human imagination as far back as we are aware, and I see my work as sitting in this very rich trajectory of cosmological inquiry.  

I’m inspired by practitioners that work at the edges of their disciplines, questioning the dominant narratives to find different perspectives on the grand questions of life. There have been many writers and key texts that have inspired my works over the years, including the writings of Leonard Shalin, Rebecca Solnit, Carlo Rovelli, Rosalind Williams, David Graeber and David Wengrow.  Jo Marchant’s The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars is a more recent example, and explores how humanity’s relationship with the cosmos has shaped our cultures, beliefs, and understanding of the world throughout history.  It also warns of our recent loss of a cosmological perspective and the very real consequences this has wrought.

Name a cultural work (film, book, music etc) that inspired or challenged your creative perspective, and tell us why.

Stumbling across the Venice Biennale as a 19-year-old was an incredibly formative experience for me.  I had grown up in Northwest Tasmania and hadn’t experienced contemporary art before.  Discovering installation art was revelatory, and in Venice I encountered an Ann Veronica Janssens work that quite literally changed my life.  Janssens had filled the Belgian Pavilion with dense fog, obscuring vision to such a degree that audiences had to move very slowly through the space.  This transformed the audience into performers, other bodies in the space becoming the subject matter of the work, disrupting the usually passive role of the observer. The sensation was so affecting that it genuinely felt like time had slowed down. I thought that if art can slow down time, then it really doesn’t get any better than this – and at that moment I decided to go to art school.

If you could collaborate with any figure from history or contemporary culture, who would it be and why?

The most recent person I’ve been inspired by is Dr Vandana Shiva, an Indian activist with a PhD in quantum physics. I love that she took quantum perspectives – an understanding of the interconnectedness of all things – and realised they weren’t being practiced in any meaningful way by the scientific or broader community, and instead devoting her life to challenging the systems that continue to exploit people and the environment. 

More than a century after the emergence of quantum mechanics, its profound implications for how we understand reality have yet to meaningfully shift the dominant frameworks through which humanity relates to the world. A foundational transformation is long overdue—one that moves us away from mechanistic, extractive paradigms and toward a worldview rooted in interconnectedness.

While I don’t believe it is art’s role to solve problems, and I resist didacticism in my own practice, I do believe that art can contribute meaningfully to broader cultural shifts in perception. Artistic practice has the capacity to open up space for new ways of seeing, feeling, and being, offering a counterpoint to fragmentation by fostering relationality, reciprocity, and care. 

What’s next? Tell us about your next project, collaboration or thinking.

In February I had the extraordinary privilege of spending a week on-site at CERN in Switzerland, the home of the Large Hadron Collider.  It was massive, tremendously exciting, completely overwhelming, and whilst the experience will continue to reverberate for quite some time to come, in the short-term it resolved a few loops in my practice and is already having important impacts on the work I’m making.  During the last several months I’ve been developing a couple of public art projects where these ideas have resonance, albeit expressed in very different ways.  I’m enjoying the immediacy of infrared photography – literally reflecting the quantum process of photosynthesis – which is at the heart of one of these projects and will be unveiled later in the year, and in the other project I’m getting to explore much bigger ideas and connections over a longer time span.  Navigating public art comes with its challenges, but hopefully I’ll be able to see both projects through to a successful resolution.