Michelle Neal

2021

cereal box cardboard on paper

26.5 x 26 cm (unframed)

38 x 37.5 cm (framed)

Finalist - ‘Still: National Still Life Award’ 2021

Life takes favoured still life imagery, a vase of flowers, and presents it as small letters cut from cereal box cardboard that was destined for the bin. The work references the experience of grief which can cause the world to seem colourless and for the recognition of beauty to become an intellectual, rather than a sensory, experience. Life represents the healing realisation that following loss, while life may be different, it can still be beautiful.

2020 - ongoing

post-it note, cereal box cardboard

75 x 75 mm

2023

cereal box cardboard on paper

21 x 29.5 cm

2020

cereal box cardboard on paper

17 x 17 cm

2024

hand-cut cereal box cardboard on paper

41.5 x 32 cm

As we walked he told me about his holiday. His response to what I’d been up to: 'nice'.

That’s why I like him so much.

2021

cereal box cardboard on paper

25 x 23 cm

‘Homecoming’ honours the moment of recognising that beauty still exists in the world following an experience of grief. It reflects a turning point.

on-going

pencil on paper

various dimensions

These portraits are motivated by connection. The connection that comes from drawing a portrait and of being alongside other drawers sharing a model.

All works drawn from life.

2020 - ongoing

various dimensions and mediums

Each Monday I draw with an online community via zoom. These are fast-paced sessions where Paris-based facilitator, Chloe Briggs, chooses a face from the 100 or so participants who’ve zoomed in and asks them to pose for the rest of us. Each pose lasts for the duration of a track of music. Originally confined to the Paris College of Art where Chloe teaches, Covid lockdowns forced the sessions online and a worldwide community of drawers was born.

on-going

ink on paper

acrylic on paper

various dimensions

Portraits painted from life.

2023

hand-cut cereal box cardboard on paper

28 cm x 24 cm

This work pays homage to a moment, when sitting on a bench in a public garden, I saw a woman hurrying through the flowerbeds.

In her, I saw a former me. Hurriedly searching for peace.

2024

cereal box cardboard on paper

21 x 29.5 cm

2023

cereal box cardboard on paper

22.5 x 19 cm

2012
cereal box cardboard
18 x 31 cm

John’s Car is from a series made with cardboard from discarded food boxes. The browny-grey of the cardboard reflects the feelings of colourlessness often described with the experience of ambiguous loss. Each work in the series presents found text from my everyday life - in this case a diary entry.

2023

cereal box cardboard

7.5 x 11 cm

2020

post-it notes, cereal box cardboard

75 x 75 mm each note

2023

hand-cut transparent paper letters on paper

13 x 14.5 cm (text block)

The still life genre is commonly associated with artists recording stationary objects that they see. My Still Life is a record of things I heard while working in my home studio.

The barely perceptible text is hand-cut from transparent paper and secured only at the top of each letter, giving the work a sense of the air on which the sounds were carried.

The work takes the ambient sounds of a gentle suburban morning and elevates them to centre stage, engaging with ideas of attentive quiet noticing.

2023

hand-cut cereal box cardboard on paper

I went on a field trip to collect observations. As I was sitting on the train waiting to return home a woman on the platform caught my attention. There was an energy about her that I wanted to record.

2024

hand-cut transparent paper letters on paper

19.5 x 14.5 cm (text block)

This work explores the idea of ‘small talk’ and its association with surface-level conversations about unimportant things.

The piece draws upon an encounter I had with a neighbour. It wasn’t whether the topics we discussed in our quick chat, or small talk, were important or not. What mattered was the sense of connection, in a day of isolation, the meetup gave.

2020

post-it notes, cereal box cardboard

75 x 75 mm each note

2013
32 index cards, collaged found text
7.6 x 12.7 cm each card

Collected Todays consists of thirty-two index cards carefully positioned on a bench seat. Each card contains a sentence made from tiny letters cut from a poetry anthology. Each sentence begins with the word ‘today’ and records an observation from my studio environment.

The observations reference the security of an assumptive world. They are of everyday experiences that may be acknowledged in the course of a day but not necessarily celebrated: seeing irises, waving to someone, having peaches in the fridge, or noticing birds walking on a window ledge.

Creating Collected Todays was a solitary and meditative process that pays homage to slow internal mending. While the act of cutting poetry suggests destroying beauty, my intention was not one of destruction but of the opposite: to take something with acknowledged beauty and carefully and lovingly piece it into a new form.

Viewers are invited to sit on the bench seat, pick up the cards and read them. Allowing the work to be touched promotes the idea of trust; that the cards, and their sentiments, will be handled with care.

2020

post-it notes, cereal box cardboard

75 x 75 mm each note

2009

watercolour on paper

each image 17 x 11.5 cm

final image - installation view

2020

post-it notes, cereal box cardboard

75 x 75 mm each note

2009

ink on paper

each work 17 x 11.5 cm

2012
collaged real estate brochures on paper
50 x 65 cm (each)

Dreams is a series of three works each depicting a ‘dream home’. The works were created by collaging images of houses cut from real estate brochures. From a distance each collaged house appears to be a feasible home. But close and careful inspection reveals that things are not quite right. Perspectives are skewed, staircases lead to nowhere, garden beds block entry through garage doors. These works explore the idea that initial impressions can offer an appearance of togetherness that does not necessarily exist, echoing presentations of ambiguous loss.

2012
cardboard, pyjama fabric, typed text
dimensions variable

Permission to Speak consists of thirty-six small fabric drawings of all the houses in my street. The drawings are made from fabric cut from second-hand men’s pyjamas glued onto cardboard from household boxes. Beneath each drawing is a strip of paper with a short, typed text that presents positive observations about my street.

Permission to Speak reflects the loss of security experienced with ambiguous loss and uses collecting as a way of providing a sense of control. While the activity of collecting is not presented overtly, it underpins the work. It takes the form of the obsessive collection of materials, the presentation of recollections, and the celebration of a collection of people that form a neighbourhood.

The work also explores ideas of the amateur creator and of trialling a re-found sense of authority. By not making a feature of these themes in the work, their presence is rendered as unremarkable, normal, the way things are. This mirrors the unquestioned, unexamined and assumed sense of mastery and security experienced in an assumptive world.

Images: Clare Rae

2016
found longstitch embroideries and original embroidery
31 x 214 cm

Home Made is a longstitch tapestry depicting a streetscape of house facades. The work was created by stitching together completed kit longstitch tapestries, found online and in opportunity shops, and adding my own home.

Home Made explores the theme of security. The work speaks to the security offered by a sense of belonging to the dream of a collective ideal and to a community of stitchers that are united virtually by their stitching of identical images from mass-produced craft kits. The kit longstitches were a vehicle to explore ideas of the amateur and of guided, risk-free steps to mastery. They were also a way to explore the physical sensation of touch as a means of connection and its relationship with feelings of comfort and security.

Images: Clare Rae

2007
photocopied money on paper
75.5 x 56.5 cm

2008
supermarket delicatessen tickets
dimensions variable

The experience of ambiguous loss can result in a person feeling that they hold less agency over their life. Blind Date with Destiny expresses this sense of powerlessness by presenting gallery walls covered with strips of numbered tickets. These types of tickets, commonly dispensed to waiting customers, suggest that the pace of a person’s life can sometimes be beyond their control. The room full of opened tickets, ready for plucking, offered a sense of the tactile and of a padded cell.

Images: Stuart Wilson

2014-15
flower-filled garden bed
approx. 3.5 x 21 m

Ever was a public artwork created in a roadside garden bed in the Melbourne suburb of Noble Park. The work used living flowers to create the word ‘ever’. The seedlings were planted in October 2014 and grew until the end of the artwork in February 2015.

As the plants in Ever grew, the form of the letters was lost, and the work transformed into a bed simply filled with red and yellow flowers. The flowerbed acted as a metaphor for life before and after ambiguous loss; transitioning through the dreams associated with planning and planting, the sunny growth of an assumptive world and the transformation into a new, yet still joyous, existence.

Ever also celebrated connections generated through collaborative work and community. Planting the flowerbed involved the skills of a team of council gardeners and the work became a topic of conversation for locals passing by.

2006
metal signs installed amongst found signage
various dimensions
(installation view)

My Signs series takes occupational health and safety signs commonly found in workplaces and adds words of whimsy to the recognisable designs. The new signs suggest care for workplace mental health and not just physical wellbeing.

‘Donkey Impersonation Area’ was a Postcard Winner in the 2007 Linden Postcard Show.

2009
mixed media installation
dimensions variable (left-hand wall is 14 m long x 1.3 m high)

The Can(n)on presented research I undertook in 2009 that questioned whether a gender-biased artistic canon is perpetuated by seeds planted in art school.

In my fine art honours year over 80% of the students were female yet references to male artists, writers and philosophers dominated the teaching environment. As evidence of this bias I logged the gender of the person who was referenced at every lecture, crit session or visiting artist talk that I went to. While Elvis Richardson’s logging of the art world is now part of the mainstream agenda, her website, the Countess, was in its infancy when I made The Can(n)on and our respective logging was unknowingly happening in parallel.

The Can(n)on consisted of a 14-metre colour coded representation of the gender of the artists who were referenced in the honours theory lectures, a bound publication filled with charts showing the results of my recordings, and a ‘shop’ displaying t-shirts, postcards, key-rings, coffee mugs, and pencils all bearing designs based upon the visual representation of the research.

The Can(n)on won the 2009 National Gallery of Victoria Prize, awarded by Monash University, and triggered changes to the university’s curriculum.

Images: Andrew Barcham

2012

staple box, matchbox, toothpicks, flannelette pyjama fabric, laundry powder box, cardboard, blu tack

various dimensions

2007
pvc tubing, dishwashing liquid and bottle
dimensions variable

2010
embroidery thread on linen
20 x 12 cm



Special is a series of embroideries I made in response to the imbalance of gender representation within the 2010 art world.

Although international exhibitions such as ‘Global Feminisms’ and ‘Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution’ were overdue celebrations and acknowledgements of women’s contribution to contemporary art, the gender-specific shows highlighted that a special platform was needed for women’s art to be seen.

This idea of separating something from the pack and categorizing it as ‘special’ formed the conceptual basis of the embroideries. The works are hand-stitched representations of the signage used by retailers to signify, not that an item is important or distinguished but that it has been categorised by management as a cheaper other.