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.
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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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