My practice moves between photography, video, projection, collage, printmaking, and sculpture, often incorporating found objects as vessels of memory. I work across traditional and digital forms, weaving them together so that traditional artistic processes are not lost but integrated into new ways of making. In amongst all this runs an extensive career in technology, which sits in tension with a strong belief that technology can erode community in its traditional sense. This juxtaposition feeds my practice: I adopt digital tools, but often in dialogue with traditional materials and methods, as a way of questioning how connection, memory, and belonging can survive in a fractured world.
The themes I have chosen throughout my artistic journey—displacement, loss, belonging, and memory—now reveal themselves as metaphors. I understand them more fully as reflections of my own transitionary journey toward recognising and embracing neurodivergence. With hindsight, I see my earlier works, including those responding to events such as Tryweryn, as part of a process: first making, then re-seeing, and only later uncovering their deeper significance. What once began as an exploration of cultural displacement has become, through reflection, a mirror of my own inner displacement and search for belonging. Alongside this, I have been drawn to the power of domestic objects—chairs, curtains, bowls, clothing—quiet anchors that appear ordinary yet are charged with memory. These objects hold both personal and collective histories, becoming vessels through which I explore the tension between cultural memory and personal identity.
My practice has also carried a performative element: taking work out into the world in ways that placed me in public space, but without seeking an audience—present yet hidden, seen yet unseen. This echoes the central question of identity that runs through my work: Who am I? After years of masking, I am still unravelling what lies at the core of me and what has been shaped by concealment. When I look at an artwork, I always begin with the overriding sense of how it makes me feel. I try to embody that same immediacy in my own work, creating space for audiences to connect not only with what they see, but with how it resonates within them.
I now find myself in a period of transition and reframing. This has been shaped by multiple strands of lived experience: the loss of both my parents, ongoing physical health challenges, and the mental health challenges that often accompany them. It has also been marked by a long menopausal journey and, more recently, the lens of late diagnosed neurodivergence. These profound experiences are shaping a process of unmasking, uncovering a more authentic voice. I now see that the metaphors embedded in my earlier themes were already pointing to this inner journey: a gradual surfacing of identity, belonging, and truth. This shift moves my practice from concealment toward expression, from the margins toward presence, from quiet observation toward a clearer articulation of lived experience.
At its core, my practice seeks to make visible the invisible: to honour the resonance of overlooked objects, to bring forward stories and voices that might otherwise remain hidden, including my own. This is also deeply bound to a strong maternal thread. I come from a family of strong women, and with my mother’s passing I stepped into the role of matriarch. From this place my practice carries a sense of advocacy and protectiveness—speaking on behalf of those who cannot always speak for themselves, whether through trauma, displacement, or exclusion.
My work weaves together memory, identity, and lived experience as a tapestry of empathy, presence, and visibility. It is both personal and communal: a means of reframing my own story while creating space for others to recognise themselves within it. In this way, my practice extends beyond the act of making—it becomes an offering, a legacy of being seen and being heard, and an invitation for others to step into their own truth.
Michelle Wright, Fine Artist 