Michelle Marie Forrest
My practice revolves around a scattered methodology—a constellation of texts, images, objects, and processes—wherein I orbit wide-ranging matters, from the intimacy of a broken heart to systemic financial instability and existential collapse.
Curious about the impact of algorithmic curation and the explosion of unvetted and unsolicited digital information, I explore the idiosyncrasies that emerge when different worlds collide. My approach is psycho-techno-archaeological: a mashup that demands active attention to tune in and process matters, as matter—not as problems to solve, but as generative material. By holding conflicting ideas and opposing goals in intentional suspense, I cultivate a creative dissonance—a space where I digitally excavate and expose the hidden tensions linking our historical selves and the technological conditions we inhabit.
Working with the permeability of boundaries, allowing thoughts, external influences, and emotions to circulate freely, my work exists in flux, as unsettled forms that oscillate between clinical detachment and emotional spillover. While no individual text, image, object, or process offers a final answer, collectively they form propositions in which the fragmented nature of lived experience and the systems that shape it are simultaneously celebrated and shattered.
Alongside my personal practice, I am currently developing a collaborative practice, We Are Only Partly Real, with the artist Steve Dutton. Formed in 2024 through a Spike Island digital commission, this collaboration draws on our backgrounds spanning language-based art, moving image, code, digital architecture, and immersive installation. We Are Only Partly Real explores unstable realities—specifically how meaning shifts between bodies, images, systems, and spaces—proposing constant renegotiation as a site of experience.
Lived Experience
Raised in a rural village in Northeast England, my practice is profoundly shaped by an early life of structural precarity. From homes slated for demolition to an ex-council house that buckled over an abandoned mine shaft, I've experienced physical and socio-economic instability firsthand. As a sickly child, I observed my parents' relentless labor. Mirroring my mother’s rituals of cleaning and decorating, and learning to lay bricks with my father as he reconfigured the home to carve out individual spaces for my large, blended family.
As the only family member to enter higher education, I applied to art school at twenty-seven through low-income fee waivers. While saving for living costs, I trained as a database developer—conceptualising it as an electronic form of cleaning and building an anti-Ballardian "High-Rise", reimagining social hierarchy by offering residents an equal footing. After graduating with a First-Class Honours degree in Fine Art at thirty, I moved to London to enter a contemporary art world previously inaccessible to me. Working in the financial district to pay off student loans and save for my Master's, I witnessed the global financial crisis from the inside. This systemic instability became a defining undercurrent of my practice, prompting site-reflective installations in semi-derelict spaces across wealthy postcodes—such as Still Life and Cleanliness is next to Godliness—that interrogated domesticity and environmental cleansing.
Financial constraints eventually pulled me back North for a residency, where I began processing the impact of the economic crash. Appropriating the commercial term "window dressing" to critique financial illusion, and influenced by Louise Bourgeois’s Cell Series, I constructed architectural units titled Moratoriums. Soon after, I began systematically emptying these units, precariously counterbalancing them as a declaration of a breaking point.
Completing my Master’s at forty, I took an unstable approach to building which culminated in Blind Faith. Reflecting on my intense work ethic and my father’s experience of becoming "jiggered"—a regional term I associate with him being left incapacitated by gruelling physical labor in his fifties—I developed a constellation of installations titled {net, works}, including Concentrate, {a violent intersection}, and Kalopsia. These works formed a deeply connected ecosystem, bringing to life the ideas in my text The Promise of a Scattered Methodology, where fragile connections act as deliberate loops—echoing the recurring cycles of labor, memory, and physical depletion and systemic fatigue.
By 2024, this methodology expanded further during a collaborative project with artist Steve Dutton under the moniker We Are Only Partly Real. Originating from a Spike Island digital commission, this joint practice spanning language-based art, moving image, code, and immersive installation began investigating how meaning shifts across bodies, systems, and spaces, staging artworks not as static objects but as dynamic fields where perception is actively reorganised through the interplay of time, materials, and information.
This year (2026), I received a diagnosis of AuDHD following recurring periods of burnout. Contemplating this neurological landscape as the root of my restless iteration—repeating, refining, and modifying—my practice has become a total rejection of static, finished structures. Instead, it exists as an accumulation of work in constant flux—a vital framework I describe as essential for navigating the volatility of socioeconomic systems and their tangible, physical realities.
Born in the North East of England, 1976
EDUCATION
2015-17 Masters of Fine Art (Distinction & Best Student Award), University of Lincoln
2003-07 BA Fine Art (1st Class Hons), University of Lincoln
ASSOCIATIONS
2026-27 Castlefield Gallery Funded Membership Awardee, Manchester, UK
2025-26 Funded Resident Awardee, The Studio Creative Tech Space, Bath Spa University, Bath, UK
2023-24 Spike Island Associate, Bristol, UK
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
2026
Brigstow Institute Connections Funding: Navigating digital dissonance by exploring emotional connections through music and sound, University of Bristol, UK From Harms to Harmonies
Bridging Emotions Symposium: Affect in Overcoming Social and Political Divides, Keio University, Tokyo, Japan. Bridging Emotions
Bath Digital Festival Residents Showcase, The Studio, Bath, UK Bath Digital Festival Residents Showcase
Glitter Hearts Immersive Lab (GHIL) workshops specialising in spatial audio, The Studio, Bath, UK
Introduction to Creating Spatial Sound for Performance workshop, The Studio, Bath, UK
AXIS Bursary Awardee 2026, AXIS Arts, UK
2023-24 Critical Mass: A 6-month group mentoring programme centred around sculpture and/or installation art, Mark Devereux Projects. CRITICAL MASS
COMMISSIONS / RESIDENCIES / FELLOWSHIPS / SEMINARS
2025 MICRO / MACRO. The Museum of Loss & Renewal Residency, Collemacchia, Molise, Italy. MICRO / MACRO
2025 Spike Island Digital Commission: We are only Partly Real, Bristol, UK. A virtual reality (VR) exhibition commissioned by Spike Island, in conversation with the artist Steve Dutton and in partnership with VR specialist Stephen Gray, funded by the University of Bristol’s AHRC Impact Acceleration Award.
2021 Lost Crisis Collective, 11th International Society Artistic Research (SAR) Seminar: Care/Dare/Share, Bergen, Norway. Lost Bergen Crisis Collective
2020/21 New Talent, Artistic Researcher Data Fellow, South West Creative Technology Network (SWCTN), Bristol, UK. A £6.5 million project to expand the use of creative technologies across the South West of England, by funding and developing creative approaches and responses to data generation, and to its capture, management, retrieval and security were at the foreground of this interdisciplinary program. Data Fellows | SWCTN | South West Creative Technology Network
2021 Critical Voices in Data Symposium, Control Shift Network (CSN), Bristol, UK. An arts programme that brings creative and critical approaches to technology by artists, technologists and producers. Control (╯°▽°)╯ ┻━┻ Shift
2017/18 Manifold: A 12-week residency funded by Quad Gallery to explore the Peak District’s mythology, topography, and geographic histories, through collaborative, expressive and experimental practice, resulting in new work commissioned for an exhibition held at Quad Gallery, Derby, UK. General Practice: Manifold | QUAD (derbyquad.co.uk)
2017 The Gathering Artist Exchange: A 12-hour residency based at ROAR, The Factory, Rotherham, UK.
2015 Artists Access to Art Colleges (AA2A) Fellow: A 9-month residency based at the University of Lincoln, UK.
2009 Creative Technician: A 6-month placement funded by Battersea Arts Centre, London, UK.
PUBLICATIONS
2025 Axis Art Highlights AXIS June / July 2025, Axis A Highlights AXIS Aug 2025, Patterns & Process AXIS Patterns & Process Oct 2025
2022 Mummy: Stratified Relationships. Issue 12: Recording and Documentation, Soanyway Magazine, UK. Soanyway Issue Twelve
2021 Love by Proxy Series. Southwest Creative Technology Network, Bristol, UK. DATA | SWCTN
2017 Concentrate: Pistoletto’s Infinity Cube, Punctuated3, a-n, UK. Punctuated3 | a-n
SOLO / COLLABORATIVE EXHIBITIONS
2025 We Are Only partly Real. Spike Island, Bristol, UK. Spike Island Digital commission: We are only Partly Real.
2017 Blind Faith. x-Church, Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, UK.
2017 Kalopsia. LPAC theatre, Lincoln, UK.
2017 Rev{o,e}l{u,a}tions. Various locations in rural Lincolnshire and Derbyshire, UK.
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2025 We Are Only Partly Real, Spike Island Open Studios, Bristol, UK.
2024 c0de to Home. East Quay Gallery, Watchet, Somerset, UK.
2022 Love by Proxy: Stratified Relations. Black Swan Arts, Frome, Somerset, UK.
2020 Love by Proxy: Diagrammatic Drawing Series. Kosar Contemporary, Bristol, UK. TAPS Now | Kosar Contemporary
2018 {a violent intersection}. 250th Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK.
2018 Gorge: An un-mountain, Atkinson Gallery, Somerset, UK.
2018 Rev{o,e}l{u,a}tions. Yellow Belly, 20-21 Visual Arts Centre, Scunthorpe, UK. Yellow Belly 2018
2017 Rev{o,e}l{u,a}tions & The Mountain and the Cave. Manifold. Quad Gallery, Derby, UK. Manifold | QUAD
2017 {net, works}. MAtter, Project Space Plus Gallery, Lincoln, UK.
2017 Concentrate: Pistoletto's Infinity Cube. Punctuated³, Courtyard Gallery, The Collection, Lincoln, UK. Punctuated3 | The Collection
2017 The Rise of Crystal Stalagmites in Speed Processing Slowly, Project Space Plus Gallery, Lincoln, UK.
2017 Moratorium II: under weigh. Project Space Plus Gallery, Lincoln, UK. Yellow Belly 2017
2016 Gorge: un-mountain in Art Is A Lie That Makes Us Realise Truth, Project Space Plus Gallery, Lincoln, UK.
2016 inline worldview or weird love nil win in (extra)ordinary objects, St Mary le Wigford Church, Lincoln, UK.
2016 Crystalline Thinking in Home-lab, Arboretum Ave, Lincoln, UK. Home-Lab 1-2
2015 derange, Gallery at St Martins, Lincoln, UK.
2015 Moratorium I: underweight in By-product, Project Space Plus Gallery, Lincoln, UK.
2010 Cleanliness is next to Godliness. The Market Estate Project by Tall Tales, Islington, London, UK.
2009 Still Life. The Duke of Clarence, Elephant & Castle, London, UK.
2007 Still Life. Damaged in Transit, The Art Organization Gallery, Nottingham, UK.
2007 Still Life. Greestone Gallery, Lincoln, UK.
2007 Souvenir Memento Mori Collection. Open Plan, Tyler Gallery, Philadelphia, USA.
2007 Home(less). Arts in the Park, Arboretum Park, Lincoln, UK.
2005 In the Kitchen (Sculpture Award Winner). South Holland Open Arts, Spalding, Lincolnshire, UK.
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So far in 2026 we have given out £500 bursaries to the following Axis Professional Members: Michelle Marie Forrest, Laura Lulika, Sasha DeWitt, John Whall.
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