Michelle Hall - (R)OARS

In her practice, Michelle Hall is a gatherer and investigator, collecting ideas through writing, found objects, images, details and textures. This occurs over extended periods of time, allowing space for materials and ideas to gestate and fortify. The process of exhibition-making prompts the artist to take stock and harvest meaning from these gatherings, bringing them together to create narratives that fall somewhere between fact, fiction and myth. Through a series of works including drawing, photography, moving image, sculptural installation and found text, the artist explores themes of healing and transformation. Hall often looks to healing modalities, real or imagined, as a way to bring voice to the complex processes of the emotional world and experiences of the psyche.

As a starting point for this body of work, Hall began working with the symbolism of oars as tools of navigation – purposeful objects that keep things afloat and moving forward. Through following leads and by chance, what arrived to her was a pile of broken paddles. These objects have been on a journey of transformation. Bathed in blue, they eventually came to form a structure that links to the colour and concepts of the throat chakra and ideas of voicing, further explored in the moving image work.

The exhibition takes place close to where the artist is from which brings a return to the ‘radicle’ – a term in botany which refers to the first part of a seedling that emerges to form roots during the process of germination. The artist was interested to return to the first moments she was introduced to healing and spiritual practices. We hear the voice of an energy healer, and relative, who first introduced her to these ideas over twenty years ago. Hall also lived next door to a tarot reader and friend, who introduced her to her practice around the same time. Through an online search some years ago, Hall found an image of the tarot reader from the RTÉ Archives that has re-emerged for this exhibition.

For (R)OARS, through a multi-faceted exploration of what lies at the root of her practice and past experience, Hall has created links between images, memories, sharing and community, to consider new forms of grounding through creative practice.

Michelle Hall is an interdisciplinary visual artist from Dublin 15. Her practice has been supported by Fingal Arts through the Artist Support Scheme 2014-2017, RHA Residency Award 2017, and a commission for INFRASTRUCTURE, the Fingal Public Art programme 2017-2021. She has exhibited her work in Ireland and abroad, and recent residencies include Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin 2018, and the Centre for the Study of Substructured Loss, London 2017 and Berlin 2019. Hall was awarded the Prague-based StartPoint Prize 2017 and the RC Lewis-Crosby Award at the RDS Visual Art Awards 2016. She received her BA Fine Art from TU Dublin in 2007 and completed the MA Art in the Contemporary World programme at NCAD in 2016. Hall was awarded the Arts Council Film Bursary 2017 and 2020, and a Visual Arts Agility Award in 2021. Hall was one of four recipients of HOMEGROUND: Art, People, Place, Identity Research and Development Mentoring Awards 2020-2021, a Draíocht and Fingal County Council’s Arts Office extended support programme for artists living/working in or from Fingal.

(R)OARS has been specially commissioned by Draíocht, as part of its celebration of visual art in its 21st year.

Image details:
forget~me~not, Digital print on Hahnemühle paper, 26 x 42cm, 2022