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Michelle Marie Forrest

Bristol
Artist and researcher.

My practice revolves around a "scattered methodology"—a constellation of texts, images, objects, and processes—in which I orbit around the impact of interconnected structural forces and the psychological reorientation that is needed to try and comprehend the things that feel impossible to talk about or touch upon directly.

 

In response to the seamless flow of algorithmic curation, I explore the friction between wide-ranging matters, which I process as physical matter: from the intimacy of a broken heart to systemic financial instability and existential cosmic collapse. By emphasising the idiosyncrasies of interpretation, I foreground the physical materiality of the editing process itself.

 

I define this approach as psycho-techno-archaeological: a "mashup" of active listening and assemblage. Here, weighted architectural fragments and weightless digital snippets—sourced from games, film, music, and literature—converge, reverberating between the ruins of an archaeological past and a techno-future.

 

Working with the permeability of boundaries—where "porosity" describes the ease with which thoughts, emotions, and external influences circulate—I refer to my body of work as "matters of dispute". These works oscillate between clinical detachment and inevitable emotional spillovers. While no individual piece offers a final answer, collectively they move from object to system, forming a series of propositions in which the fragmented nature of lived experience and the systems that shape it are simultaneously celebrated and shattered.

 

Featured in

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