Made with love in Sunny Castlemaine.

Michael Wolfe has had over 30 solo exhibitions and numerous group shows, been included in the 2019 Castlemaine State Festival with the exhibition ‘Shimmer’, the 2020 contemporary landscape survey show (Con)textural Landscapes at Bendigo Art Gallery, 2020 Ballarat International Photo Biennale open program and collaborated with renowned Australian author Alex Miller in the international collab project and exhibition Now&Them in Shanghai China.

Michael is a 2022 finalist in the National Photographic Portrait Prize and is working towards a 2023 solo exhibition at Castlemaine Art Museum.

His most recent touring exhibition, a collaboration with writer Kirsten Krauth and lyrics by Nick Cave, Someone To Watch Over Me – The Better Angels of Our Nature, is part of St Kilda Writer’s Week, Ballarat International Photo Biennale and International Poetry Day 2022.

The exhibition explores themes of remembrance as expressed in memorial statuary and reflections on loss, sorrow, absence, melancholy and letting go in these uncertain times. How do we appeal to the better angels of our nature and where are they - just when we need them the most.

“These are old bones and old metaphors – artists and poets have been here before, many times. But both photographer and writer have found a path through the tangled undergrowth of familiar images to create new work which is sensitive, disconcerting and strong.” Jennifer Long, Curator.

“It seems to me there is something significant and felicitous that sculpture and poetry should be brought together with the art of photography. There’s something about great photography which is elegiac, about fixing and conserving lachrimae rerum – tears at the heart of things.” John Wolseley, Artist.

Michael has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally and my work is included in public, corporate and private collections.

Collections include: Bendigo Art Gallery; La Trobe University; Capital Theatre, Bendigo; Old Fire Station Arts Centre, Bendigo, La Trobe Building Society.

It takes time to create a work. Hours. Months. Years. 
Years of learning, training, honing, critiquing, getting by and making do, losing and finding, finishing and starting over and then starting over again. 
To draw on instincts so patiently and impatiently developed – until, one day, you suddenly discover that it’s instinct that you’re applying, that your hands have their own memory, that craft is a vocabulary and composition a grammar. 
Time has shifted, and the work that you’ve created – which only a moment ago, did not exist – now looks toward a new future, because nobody has experienced it yet but you.
And when somebody does encounter it, it won’t be that sense of long time or deep practice that they experience, but the new set of associations that the work has set into being just for them. A new forward momentum of new recollections and new imaginings. A moment in time that creates countless others. 
Your work has created a new future. 

Esther Anatolitis