Short conversation with Michelle Allard.

Highlife 2007, Michelle Allard

Greenscape 2006, Michelle Allard

JM: Exploiting the emergent properties of a chosen material, its this approach to pushing these in-organic materials to "grow" in such organic manner as a process of making that I'm increasingly interested in.

MA: Very well put. The process of making alongside respecting a material's intrinsic and extrinsic properties, respecting those functional and conceptual frameworks. I also see in both of our works a merging of process of both the industrially or manmade and the organic. Change and accumulation are ever present.

JM: You seem to be drawn towards packaging materials when making work, the type of material that is formed and used to protect another object of "real worth" and then usually discarded or re-used for a similar job. Do you feel by using these materials to make artwork you are raising their status to something of a worthy object or is it more a case of the history of the material and how its nature of packing and stacking relates to this accumulative form of growth?

MA: I initially began using packing and related lightweight materials as both an elation or sublimation of such materials but also as a practical solution to wanting to explore form with little worry of storing and shipping. It was during artist residencies that I found was most exciting was just to show up with very little, and make more out of less, to suggest weight and mass while steering away from art historical materials.