(Text by Tom Walgers)

Michael is a Bundjalung man working in Lismore painting his story. Born to a white fisherman and a Murri woman, Michael grew up in Minjungbal country roughly situated in the Tweed Heads and Gold Coast area. This exhibition at Lismore Regional Gallery brings together two bodies of work from different periods of his life. The series are called, Cosmology In Me and My Saltwater Murris, with the exhibition taking on the same name of the first series. Together the works show us the constant themes of memory and history, the change within Michael as a person, as well as the development of his own form expression in relating the interconnection of identity, country and the wider universe.

Completed fifteen years ago through a local art therapy program after twenty years of drug and alcohol addiction, Cosmology In Me is Michael’s earliest body of work as a visual artist.

It was pretty frantic when I did the work. It was very cathartic and very quick. I think at this time when this work came about, I was quite amazed at how this body of work came out. I had no preconceived idea. I was just drawing – just getting it out. It still took a little longer after the drawings for me to get into art. These drawings came about a year or two, maybe three before the art started taking off.

The science of the origin and development of the universe’s cosmology is directed inwards as the origin of oneself, of where one comes from, of who one is. Michael connects disparate fragments to create a sense of coherent reality, remembered childhood story, flashes of country, and ongoing relationships with family are processed and projected as his personal story. An inner story creates the opportunity for a dialogue and common narratives between persons or peoples. These stories are for everyone he says. For Michael art has always been a healing and reconciliative process.

I wish I had spent more time with the elders. I have been trying to piece together what I can over the years. Art has been part of that process and it’s definitely been a personal journey. It really is about me becoming whole. I want to know where I come from.

These early drawings map an interior world, as a chart of emotional dynamics between Michael, his family and friends. They can be understood as spirit images depicting an unseen world of energy and flow, each figure with its definitive place as parts within an infinite whole. Trunks dissolve into arms, which dissolve into fingers, before becoming currents within a larger network. Heads and reproductive organs are aggregations of flow. Egg, seeds, trees – everything is in constant flux between spirit and matter. There are hierarchies of form, within which there are orders of vibration, with further typologies of amplitude and frequency. This is a language of relation and connection.

The truth in doing those things is it’s simple. I don’t have to have an art degree. I don’t have to do a life drawing type of image, it’s enough for me to do a stick figure. I’ve used my own subconscious imagery. That’s enough for me to create the image that can evoke that spirit. There’s still a part of me that believes in the afterlife and spirit people. I suppose it’s different now to when I was younger. I have said it publicly before and I do believe the ancestors are with me in spirit.

The lyricism and gesture of the line and pattern reaches a note of hyperactivity and hints at anxiety, violence and fixation. The connections between figures are sometimes expressed as tension and power, with the tortured figure suspended within the larger web. After twenty years of alcohol and drug abuse, things had finally caught up with Michael.

Since I got sober it hit me. I’d stopped taking drugs and drinking alcohol. Those experiences had penetrated me but I didn’t get to feel them until I had stopped drinking and taking drugs. And I have basically been dealing with that for the last fifteen years. A big part of dealing with that has been through art.

Michael Philp

Michael Philp