Michelle Malone

Michelle Malone lives and works in Dublin. She completed a BA in Fine Art at Technological University Dublin between 2016 and 2020, and received an MA in Creative Arts from TU Dublin in 2021. Her multi-disciplinary installations comprise sculpture, image-making, oral histories, audio and text based on her experience growing up in a variety of social housing systems in the inner-city.

By bringing together materials, objects, images, and stories in an installation context her work creates a space for discussion and reflection on working-class histories. It is her belief that it is much needed in this industry to let working-class people tell their own stories. She also believes all materials are biased, and that objects have a collectively known cultural value. It is her intention to instrumentalise and weaponise the shared meaning of materials and objects to visually tell working-class histories and to create an embodied empathy/identity for the subject matter. She is working on a year-long project based on the regeneration of flat complexes like the Oliver Bond Flats where she grew up, and will include sculptures of things like communal washing poles, stairway arches, rubbish chute systems, pram sheds and other things unique to these sites.

Michelle Malone applied for a Golden Fleece Award to fund the development of a new body of work based on her experience living in Spain in starkly contrasting working-class conditions from age 11 to 15 and influenced by her exposure to Spanish/Moorish architecture and a wide variety of materials and terrains that significantly differed from her upbringing in Ireland.