Museum of Brisbane’s current artist-in-residence Michelle Eskola is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice traverses painting, textile, and installation, often incorporating repetitious iconography and labour intensive techniques.

During her residency Michelle will engage the Museum’s visitors in the creation of her work Quasi Things.

In Quasi Things, Michelle investigates the essence of Brisbane City Hall, exploring the space between the surrounding environment and the limits of self. Working with abstraction, she will mine the building’s classical architecture, with its emphasis on symmetry and formality, for analogies in psychology.

Her works will also delve into ideas of duality such as light and shadow, structure and atmosphere, as a metaphor for representing the mind as a space that also has architecture. It will traverse notions of interior and exterior, real and unreal, surface and depth, with paint as a part of the expressiveness of the space.

Exploring abstraction with ‘a kind of presentness’, Michelle’s residency will reveal the private activity of painting as an embodiment of the surrounding space and its atmosphere. She is also excited by the potential for interactions with Museum visitors and welcomes opportunities for chance occurrences to alter her process.

Michelle completed an Honours Degree in Fine Arts, Visual Arts Practice at the Queensland University of Technology (2008) and a Post Graduate Diploma in Visual Arts (2014). She has exhibited extensively both locally and nationally, and her works feature in many private, corporate and public collections throughout Australia.