Michelle Molinari is a graduate of Victorian College of the Arts. She’s a taxidermy artist, printmaker and painter. Her work focuses primarily on and encompasses notions of observation, memorialization and death through the taxidermy genre. By working across various media Michelle looks to shadow the divisions that usually exist between these artistic disciplines. She incorporates multiple mediums within a single piece of work and explores the relationships that are created between the object and its image. Michelle draws upon the tradition of European still life and the taxidermic representation histories to create her own taxidermy which brings out the inspiration for her still life arrangements. She works from observation to make her paintings highlight sentimentality and beauty that is implicit of her own gestural enthusiasms for memorializing and preserving the death of these specimens.
The understanding and process of taxidermy is vital to the developmental process of her work. This act of creating the taxidermy enable’s her to acquire an empathetic and internal understanding of the animal, and also helps her to reveal the human sentiment of holding something away from death. In 2012, Michelle was awarded the Majlis Encouragement Award and the Fiona Myer Award. Michelle exhibited in Flinders Lane Gallery’s annual exhibition of emerging artist Exploration 13. In 2014, she held a highly successful first one-person exhibition with Flinders Lane Gallery and in the same year she was announced in the Eutick Still Life Award as a finalist. In 2014, she won the Graeme Hildebrant Foundation Travel Grant. This allowed her to reside in both Florence (Italy) and New York (USA).
