Familiars 2025

Familiars was a solo exhibition first exhibited in a private residence in 2025. It explored interior domestic space as an architecture of the psyche, and how the personal objects we keep with us in the stillness of this place, might become animistic channels to the ‘outside’, or the ‘wild’.

Considering the presence of both ephemeral and material forms as instruments of deepening, and sites of transformation, I took significant objects and motifs from within my own personal space and explored them as meshings of spirit and material, whilst re-situating them in another person’s home.

Sound artist Ian Moorhead ‘recorded the room’, using electromagnetic receivers to pick up the inaudible resonance of the space, bringing it into an acoustic presence.

Through the choreography of evocative sculptural forms and sound, this installation of work explored the gentle practices we cultivate that permeate the imaginative boundaries between self and ‘other’, and the provocative power of the spaces and objects we keep intimate relationships with.

Concept, Visual Artist - Michaela Pegum

Sound - Ian Moorhead

Lighting - Bosco Shaw

Pictured in foreground, seated on faux crocodile skin chair:

Vale II 2025, copper, silver, organza

Pelt 2025, copper, velvet, silver

Instrument 2025, copper, velvet, silver

In background:

Channel 2025, Eucalyptus Grandis, acrylic paint, mystery substance

Transfiguration I 2025, copper, silver, velvet, nylon coated steel wire

Figure/Passage (IV) 2025, copper, silver, velvet

Figure/Passage (I) 2025, copper, silver, velvet

Figure/Passage (I) 2025, copper, silver, velvet

Figure/Passage (II) 2025, copper, silver, velvet

Photography: Matthew Stanton