Dr Micheila Petersfield is a contemporary artist currently based in Melbourne, Victoria. Working across both photography and paint, Petersfield’s practice is the critique of how women are portrayed in popular media, creating subversive interpretations that subtly parody familiar feminine tropes and its idealised aesthetics. This includes borrowing from the exaggerated aesthetics synonymous with cinema and women’s magazines from the 1960s and 1970s, reimagining their seductive visual qualities through glossy surfaces and hyper-realistic saturation.
Sunglasses represents a major shift within Petersfield’s work and the formal expansion in their use of paint into their professional practice. This work marks the first major piece created for their first solo exhibition working exclusively in paint, translating their highly distinctive photographic style to canvas. Through this shift in medium, Petersfield expands on the vernacular of self-imaging and the role of portraiture within a growing visual economy. As such, painting allows Petersfield to emphasise how colour, surface and augmented realism functions to seduce the viewer.
Combining elements of Pop Art, nostalgia and hyper-glamour, each composition becomes a portal into the transformative world of contemporary self-imaging, including the use of costumes and pose to adopt multiple personas. Meticulously rendered, each painting is characterised by its flawless finish, amplifying its superficial appearance and camp performative qualities, their large-scale and cropped compositions enhancing their visual impact.
Petersfield graduated with first class honours from the University of Tasmania in 2017, completing a PhD in the Creative Arts in 2023. She was awarded the emerging artist prize at the inaugural Woman’s Art Prize Tasmania in 2019, as well a winning the Henry Jones Art Prize the same year. Her work is held in private collections nationally and overseas.
MICHEILA PETERSFIELD
Sunglasses 2023
oil on canvas
122 x 76 cm
$6,000
[Private collection Melbourne]
