Michal Glikson Artist Statement
My work is about conveying experiences and people I encounter across cultures of Australia, Pakistan and India through images that combine the seen with the symbolic in visualizing emotional perspectives of crossing.
The stories that I discover unfold in an experiential and empathic way. A scroll is a compact and constant travelling companion and creating it becomes a part of daily life. I work in all kinds of spaces - teashops, stations, tents, footpaths, and at night wherever I happen to be staying. Collecting sound coalesces with this process, and film and photography assist recreating events at later stages. I have found especially in sub continental societies, people respond with great trust and pleasure to being drawn and painted by hand. This greatly assists the process of gathering and forming stories that contain meaningful accounts of people’s lives.
Sound reflects my love of the oral storytelling tradition. I keep journals, and record encounters with songs, music, conversations, and the noises of the everyday. I narrate and record journal excerpts together with found sound to form the aural components to scrolls.
My paintings employ techniques and motifs drawn from Mughal miniature Painting. I seek to utilize the allure of the Miniature aesthetic to illustrate ordinary worlds/extraordinary worlds and people.
Importantly my intention is to find ways of allowing the work to embrace and communicate the process and nature of the journey itself. The scrolls are living documents where marks imposed over time, travel and being held by many, many hands along the way form integral parts of the painting, and the larger story.
About the Exhibition
The works in this exhibition were made between 2008 and 2012 - time during which I have been studying, living and journeying between Australia, India and Pakistan.
Each scroll is a discrete work, a visual testimony to time spent in particular places and where taaluq – which in urdu refers to the possible relationship- is a guiding force. But these works are also an archive and record particular to a certain age, time and space. Here voice and images of the storyteller reflects a sense of this age as one characterized by the transitory, and a search for identity through the notion of taaluq.
