MIKALA DWYER

Born 1959 in Sydney, Australia. Lives and works in Sydney.

Mikala Dwyer is a Sydney-based artist, and lecturer in painting at the Sydney College of the Arts. Dwyer is known for her playful, imaginative style and fantastic installations that explore different notions of time, space and reality, borrowing ideas from science, architecture and clairvoyance.

Dwyer’s abstract installations resemble make-shift architecture fabricated out of plastic, Styrofoam, fabric, modelling clay and domestic materials such as television sets, nail polish and vacuum cleaners. Avoiding the use of figurative forms because of their restrictive nature, Dwyer seeks to dissolve distinctions of appearance in her work to allow for wider interpretations of time and space. In Woops (1994), an experimental work combining domestic materials shrouded in nylon stockings taking on alien forms with monochrome wall paintings painted with nail polish, the artist aimed to disorientate the viewer and induce ‘a bit of an identity crisis’. Her affinity with plastic is evident in sculpture works such as Empty Structure (2003) and Swamp Sculpture (2006) – a floating work that sits upon a mossy pond in Omi Sculpture Park, Upstate New York; a seemingly incongruous addition to the natural environment, yet harmonious for its beauty, stature and freedom of movement. Dwyer references the ancient wonder of the hanging gardens of Babylon in a series of ‘Hanging Garden’ works. Smoking, Drinking Sculptures (2006) and Hanging Smoking Garden (2007) demonstrate another fusion of the natural – plants in soil – with the unnatural – plastic, ashtrays or bottles of vodka. Each object is suspended in isolation, contained in its own ‘transparent microsphere’ of plastic casing. The plants are vulnerable, in need of care, while dirty ashtrays and vodka bottles imply a general disregard, human recklessness, operating in parallel with nature.

The Additions and the Subtractions (2007) is a collection of mixed media works that owe their form to a circle. Inward-facing sculptures resembling animals, cartoon figures, alien creatures or tribal masks stand at various heights, primitive in nature and composition. The title of this work suggests simplicity and ease of transformation, as the artist’s intervention of removing or adding individual objects will change the composition entirely. Dwyer has produced various incarnations of Additions and Subtractions, some made interactive with the provision of stools for audience members to sit on and join the circle. She has also often experimented with combining various past works into new assemblages, bound with their own ‘idiosyncratic logic’, reflecting her ongoing investigation into the ‘core structures’ of human imagination.

Mikala Dwyer will create a new site-specific installation on Cockatoo Island for the 17th Biennale of Sydney. A collection of carved sandstone ‘zeroes’ are amassed, while in a sheltered cave on the southern side of the island the sounds of chipping stone emanate. The matter chipped away from the sandstone becomes, in a sense, a ‘sonic object’, as the artist creates a density of audio from the negative space, or hole, cut out of the stones. The ghostly sounds fill the void of the cave with an apparition of the material that once made up the lumps of stone. In the belief that the island’s history and memory is imprinted in its archaeology, Dwyer aims to revive the memory of Cockatoo Island and animate its many ghosts.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2009 ‘Outfield’, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, Australia
2008 ‘Swamp Geometry’, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne, Australia
2008 ‘Monoclinic’, Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand
2007 ‘Black Sun Blue Moon’, Hamish Morrison Galerie, Berlin, Germany
2000 ‘Mikala Dwyer’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia

Selected Group Exhibitions

2009 ‘Almanac’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia
2008 ‘Come In: Interior Design as a Contemporary Medium in Germany’, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology Gallery, Melbourne, Australia
2007 ‘Mystic Truths’, Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand
2006 ‘High Tide’, Zacheta National Gallery Poland, Warsaw, Poland
2003 ‘Face Up’, Hamburger Bahnhof National Galerie, Berlin, Germany

Selected Bibliography

Edward Colless, Mikala Dwyer, exhibition catalogue, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2000
Natasha Conland, Mystic Truths, exhibition catalogue, Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland, 2008
Charlotte Day, Lost and Found: An Archaeology of the Present, exhibition catalogue, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, Victoria, 2008
Linda Michael, ‘Little Temple of Love for The Dead Things’, Mikala Dwyer, exhibition catalogue, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2000
Toni Ross, ‘The Trouble with Spectator Centred Criticism: Encountering Mikala Dwyer’s Art with Eva Hesse and Minimalism’, Eyeline, no. 35, summer 1997–98, pp. 27–33