Anne-Marie May
Horizon portal 2025
acrylic, wood, steel
$POA
Anne-Marie May works across sculpture, installation, design and textiles to explore spatial, perceptual and chromatic relationships. Her practice creates both spatial and conceptual connections between an artwork and its architectural location. Making and materiality are central to May’s work, and a long-standing interest in architecture and craft informs her experimentation with process and the production of objects. Resisting industrial modes of fabrication, May privileges a studio-based, craft-orientated, thinking-through-making approach that fosters variation and irregularity. Experimentation plays an important role in her studio practice, where material and process interactions invite unexpected outcomes.
Horizon portal 2025 is a prismatic viewing structure, where the internal walls are highly polished capturing and deflecting an image of the sea, sky and horizon line, producing an optical effect similar to a kaleidoscope. Installed on the Lorne pier, this interactive work fragments the viewer's perspective of the horizon line to encourage new experiences of place. The junction between sea and sky anchors the work visually and thematically, guided by the idea that a boundary is not simply a division or separation, but can also be considered in terms of an intersection and a place of exchange.
Based in Melbourne, May completed a Doctor of Philosophy, Fine Art at Monash University (2020), and a Bachelor of Fine Arts, Painting at Victoria College, Melbourne (1987). She has exhibited since 1988 and was a member of the influential artist-run space Store 5 in Melbourne. Selected solo exhibitions include Felt Paintings, Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington (2023); Everyday Joyful is Mobile, Shepparton Art Gallery (2021); Inside Out: Space and Process, Erwin Fabian and Anne-Marie May, McClelland, Langwarrin (2020); and Making and Undoing, MADA Gallery, Monash University, Melbourne (2019). Group exhibitions include Pliable Planes: Expanded Textile and Fibre Practices, UNSW Gallery, Ballarat Art Museum, Dubbo Art Gallery, and Fremantle Arts Centre (2023); Every Brilliant Eye: Australian Art of the 1990s, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2017); and Less is more: Minimal and post-minimal art in Australia, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne (2012). May’s work is held in public and private collections including Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Geelong Gallery, and Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, Auckland.
Anne-Marie May collaborates with Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington.
Images: Untitled 2013 (top); Anne-Marie May (bottom). Courtesy the artist.
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