Michaye Boulter: Atmospheres

In my studio, there is a large table with a pile of ill-printed photographs; they have been drawn on, ripped up, some photocopied into black and white and drawn on again. There are plenty more in boxes; these are chosen. For a memory, I can’t quite place, nestled amid grasses along the foreshore, an intensity of light or a specific colour, soft duck egg blue, or rich purply greys. They aren’t in chronological or geographical order. They are of places I’ve spent time in and are embedded with recollection and reverie, but now, in my studio, these images reworked, re-felt, and reimagined into collages, become something else. A portal into an imagined realm. Holding these little worlds in my hand, they seem tantalisingly real. And yet, they are also a passage through reality, time, and emotion. They offer clarity and an enigma. And so, I paint to elucidate a certain feeling or atmosphere – describing the space between becoming and dissolving, intimacy and distance, presence and absence. Recomposing familiar landscapes into descriptions of the slow transition of time, one moment to the next, overlapping and turning back on itself. The strange mixed—up continuum of life, an everchanging, incomplete collection of atmospheres.

Michaye Boulter’s landscapes, though undeniably Tasmanian, have a universal quality. The bulk of the headlands and the dark cuts of the escarpments are softened by a timeless mist. The ragged shorelines are washed softly by an ocean that touches shores elsewhere. These are not landscapes framed by windows, they are seascapes that engulf us from an impossible shoreline.

Locating oneself in Boulter’s present is at once inescapable and impossible. Her landscapes are photographic the way memory is, the details are perfect—light catches the crest of every wave, shadows thicken at the edges of the water—but the colour is deeper, the sound is heavier, losing itself in the noise of the blood pulsing in your ears. Place is rendered so vividly that it becomes indiscernible from anywhere else, it is a shared dream, an imagined, internal ocean.

We are enveloped by Boulter’s visions as they dissolve single point perspective and with it the sense that we are separable from our surrounds. Though alone with these images, there is no loneliness, we breathe this bay, this ocean, this light, sheltered in this cove of low-lying cloud with something beyond only ourselves.

Michaye Boulter holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Tasmania, and her work has been exhibited extensively around the country. The artist was a finalist in the Wynne Prize (2019), John Glover Prize (2017, 2012, 2010, 2009 and 2008), Tattersalls Art Prize (2017), Paddington Art Prize (2016) and John Leslie Art Prize (2014). Her work is also held in various public and private collections around Australia, including the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and Parliament House, Canberra.

email the gallery to register your interest in this exhibition

read about Michaye in TasWeekend Magazine, June 2024