Michelle Hamer:
The Non-Threat Threat
Ecofeminist Bonita Ely’s practice since the 1970s has renewed relevance in a pandemic era.
For more than 15 years, Melbourne-based artist Michelle Hamer has used signage and language as a means to interpret and disrupt relationships to urban environments – both her own and her audiences. Working predominantly with hand-stitching on perforated plastic grids, Hamer is an artist who meticulously observes the city as she moves through it. Are You Having a Good Night?, currently on show at Fremantle Arts Centre, is Hamer’s 23rd solo exhibition. In it, she draws attention to the covert and often threatening language women are confronted by every day. And for her latest exhibition 2020 is Cancelled, at Warrnambool Art Gallery, Hamer presents a new series produced entirely during Melbourne’s COVID-19 lockdown that both historicises and interrogates the language that has come to define this year.
There is a pervasive sense of familiarity in your current exhibition at Fremantle Arts Centre. What is your process for collecting source material?
Most of my work is based on my own photographs of signage and language in the environments around us. I also keep lists of text – I note things down that are said to me or I hear said to others, and instances that people recall. While preparing for my survey show at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery in 2018, I had the opportunity to reflect on my practice. And I realised just how much of the language in my work contained embedded threats, and that I needed to step into that. With that framework, I increasingly noticed the threatening language that was said to me..Subscribe to read this article in full
