ABOUT
Michelle Hyland is an Australian artist whose practice spans painting, collage, drawing, and installation. Her work explores impermanence, material circulation, and the shifting status of discarded urban matter.
Hyland works through walking-based research, collecting fragments from urban environments and constructing temporary arrangements that respond to chance, proximity, and spatial tension. These assemblages are not treated as fixed compositions, but as transitional systems that are reconfigured through painting.
Painting functions in her practice as a second site of transformation. Objects and materials are translated into painted space, where they become ambiguous forms—oscillating between recognition and abstraction, presence and dissolution.
Her work is informed by an interest in the ethics and aesthetics of waste, and how contemporary urban environments produce excess material that can be re-read as relational rather than redundant.
Hyland has exhibited in Australia and internationally and continues to develop her practice through research in European cities, including Berlin and Rome.