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Formless Intimacies

Location

VCA Grad Show, 2022.
Master of Contemporary Art, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne

Date

November 2022

Details

Installation, five-channel HD digital video (16:9), 2.2 channel sound. Dimensions variable, 8:00min
Videographer Grace Dephoff
Documentation by SLACK

Curator Tour by Emily Cormack

Using performance, video, and sound, Formless Intimacies explores the fragile thresholds between body, breath, and object. Within a ritualised environment, the artist moves in slow, meditative gestures alongside the shifting surface of a large inflatable form. Constructed from heat-fused membranes, the material resists immediate recognition, its luminous golden light and morphing architecture inviting a sense of reverence and dislocation.

Filmed from within the structure, the camera captures the body as both subject and witness, tracing an evolving dialogue between flesh and form. The ambient soundscape — a low resonance of thunder and singing bowls — deepens the encounter, heightening the slow emergence of a space where touch, air, and time collapse into one another.

Through an economy of means, an ordinary substance is transfigured: absence breathes into presence, and the membrane between self and world becomes a site of intimacy, dissolution, and quiet transformation.

I live, love and work on unceded Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Boon Wurrung lands of the Eastern Kulin Nation.

My practice is shaped in relation to this place, and with deep respect for the cultural knowledge that continues to hold it. This always was, and always will be, Aboriginal land.

© 2025 by Damchö - Michelle Tonkin. All rights reserved. 

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