Michael Gittings — Oigall Projects

According to Gittings, it wasn’t always destined to be furniture or sculpture. “I originally wanted to make guitars” he admits with a smile. “But then I quickly worked out I can’t do that, because there’s certain... limitations. Like a guitar or violin actually has to sound good [laughs]. Like you can’t just make a shit sounding guitar” he quips. “What I like about furniture, is that there’s a starting place to begin from. There’s still some constraints... but there just feels like all of these possibilities. You can make so many different shapes, textures, weird forms. I don’t necessarily think about it conceptually, I just find it more interesting to play with these things and ideas and see where the work wants to go.”

“It’s heaps darker now than I originally imagined. When I first started thinking about the show, I liked the idea of it existing within a kind of fantasy realm. It was very colourful, there was lots of mirrored surfaces. But that idea just morphed when I discovered how to texture the metal in this specific way, instead of polishing. I also started thinking about panpsychism, the consciousness of plants and animals, a more psychological direction than the last collection I made. I started having weird dreams, which usually happens in the lead up to a show. I’m working constantly and so a symbiosis occurs. There’s a dark violence to them now.”