Michael Nay is an artist and educator currently based in Tasmania. Michael graduated with a Graduate Diploma in Fine Art from the Victoria Collage for the Arts in 1982, completing a Masters in Fine Art (research) in 2016 at the University of Tasmania. Michael’s practice draws from experiences spent travelling and studying across Australia, reflecting on themes such as landscape, as well as social and personal histories. Through large-scale works, Michael explores the relationships between these experiences, using paint to challenge notions of cultural dislocation and national identity. Michael often translates collage-based compositions to represent ideas around childhood and the fragmentation of memory, positioning unremarkable, yet nostalgic objects into remembered spaces.
“My paintings are based on collages that I make using drawn and photographed imagery of unremarkable objects collected over a lifetime – some loved, others with uncertain histories. I place these objects in the remembered spaces of my childhood, on ‘sightlines’ carefully positioned to create palpable connections between the verified and the remembered.
Ultimately, whilst the subject matter of these paintings is drawn from my personal experiences and associations with the depicted objects, for the viewer the paintings show the workings of memory and how it can be represented visually.” Michael Nay 2019
Michael is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Creative Arts and Media, University of Tasmania and will be exhibiting new work as part of the group exhibition Still Life, opening 4 March 2020.
Exhibitions
