Micheline Robinson
Thank you for visiting my website!
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I'm a French-Canadian contemporary artist presently living on the Kapiti Coast of NZ. Rooted in a multidisciplinary practice that spans painting, photography, and music composition, my background includes Fine Arts and Film Animation from Concordia University in Montreal, alongside studies in conceptual art at Ottawa University.
My practice currently explores the power of optical illusions to destabilize perception and provoke inquiry into the nature of reality. Through carved flat metal panels and layered, translucent inks, I create surfaces that oscillate between flatness and illusory depth, inviting viewers to question the boundaries of the visible. Each work is a visual paradox, designed to elicit a moment of disorientation...a pause where the mind grapples with what is seen versus what is known. I’m fascinated by how these deceptions challenge our assumptions, and keen to spark curiosity about the interplay of material, light, and perception. Currently, I question expat liminality...the profound sense of being in-between worlds, neither fully here nor there, that comes with uprooting one's life across borders. This draws from my own experiences as a trailing spouse and expatriate, navigating the dual emotions of awe in discovering new "specimens" of flora, fauna, and culture, while grappling with the angst of isolation, the passage of time away from family and friends overseas, and the mental health challenges of feeling perpetually on the edge of belonging. These themes extend into the politics of the outsider, probing how identity, hyper-connectivity, and societal standards shift in unfamiliar contexts, often leaving one to confront solitude amid a digitally linked world. Interwoven with this is my exploration of the ethics around organoid intelligence (O.I.), an emerging field where lab-grown brain-like structures raise urgent questions about consciousness, humanity's place in the biological-digital continuum, and our moral responsibilities toward sentient-like entities...which, mirror the illusions in my art that blur human experience with artificial constructs, as seen in pieces like "O.I. Vitro Infiltration".
I'm in constant pursuit of creating new visual experiences and will occasionally chemically explore with materials to create new effects (one such exploration led me to use amino acids to create hairlike textures). My newest large-scale individual creature like abstractions, sometimes resonant with the materiality of glass or pounamu (although I try to create new never seen before textures), celebrate the sensual interplay of colour and form in a visceral way, avoiding in themselves the over-conceptualization to instead embody the atoms and elements of our world in playful, escapist environments that respond to the disjointed nature of modern life. Through this, I aim to remind viewers of the tangibility and inherent beauty in random existence, fostering moments of reflection on the unseen fabric of reality.
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