Michelle Gow -Taking Hold I–IV, 2026

Medium
Mixed media assemblage incorporating aluminium, leather, charred timber, metal fixtures and lichen on panel, presented in four shadow boxes

Installed together as a 2 × 2 window grid with approximately 2 cm spacing between each work.

Taking Hold I–IV considers what happens when a place abandoned by one life form becomes shelter for another.

Across fractured surfaces of metal, leather and charred timber, deterioration becomes a point of transition rather than an ending. Lichen begins to take hold within seams, ruptures and damaged surfaces, quietly inhabiting a structure that has been left behind.

What we might recognise as corrosion, decay and loss becomes, for another form of life, shelter and a place to belong. The work considers home not as something fixed or exclusively human, but as something that can be reclaimed, adapted and inhabited again.

Presented together as a four-part window grid, the works offer separate views into the same changing structure — moments in which abandonment and renewal exist simultaneously.