Michael Dean

(UnfuckingTitled) HAPPY END, 2022, Reinforced concrete, pigment, 134.5 x 135 x 54 cm

Jungle is Massive, Installation view, Herald St, London, UK, 2022

Lost True Leaves, Installation view, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, US, 2016

Unfucking Titled, 2018, Steel, concrete, corrugated plastic, balloons, cable ties, padlocks and scene tape, 230 x 165 x 335 cm

Interview with a.n

A Q&A with… Michael Dean, sculptor

The South London Gallery show [in 2016] was the first time I’d seen your work. There was an elusive narrative running through it, like a series of codes or a puzzle you had try hard to work out. Is narrative important, or do you try to resist it in your work?

MD: I don’t try to resist it, I try to kind of wallow in it, and wallow in as many different narratives as I possibly can, because I’m looking for an experience in which there’s a range of trajectories, where there’s a whole bunch of voices going on.

Interview with Barakat Contemporary

I found out writing as such tends to involve this power relationship between the reader and the writer. Writing in its standard form as text printed flat on a book, this is the pursuit of interpretation. This doesn’t interest me that much. What interests me in the point where the reader is free from this political situation of interpreting me as the central player, I found by turning writing into objects that there’s more potential for the reader(viewer) to participate in an experience of the writing. So I found that by imitating nature perhaps imitating the landscape that can produce a situation in which the reader is equal to me as writer.

(…)

I’m interested in all modes of communication in relation to language and stating one’s presence and in the past. Perhaps kissing using one’s tongue was a way of situating your presence and communicating something without words.

(…)

I was thinking of the hourglass and the passage of time and its formal equivalence to the letter x and there seem to be a certain relevance to dusting that work with cement which in itself is a form of death. Cement being limestone, the burnt calcified fragments of life forms from billion of years ago made into powder, that I then dust with a kiss.