IN HOUSE -Michelle Deignan
- SBP Content
- Sep 15
- 4 min read
We’re delighted to announce the project by Michelle Deignan, the fifth invited artist in our IN HOUSE series of collaborations between the House of Sarah Baker and artists, illustrators and designers. IN HOUSE invites visual creatives to take over the brand's Instagram channel with their personal, bespoke responses to our fragrances.
Text written by IN HOUSE curator, Ken Pratt
Michelle Deignan is an Irish artist whose practice primarily involves making film, but occasionally includes printmaking, photography, installation and conceptual works. While her work often operates in ways and on circuits more traditionally used by filmmakers, she makes her films from a position of an artist. Within her oeuvre we often encounter recurring themes: feminism; Romanticism or the interrogation of the production and dissemination of culture, now and historically.
Her works tangentially engage subjects such as local and international identity, nationalism, gender, class politics and aesthetics and, increasingly, the natural world and landscape. Her work is underpinned by a robust academic understanding of her subjects, though you’d hardly ever notice it. Hers is not the dry discourse of the academic she is, but more likely to look to beauty or humour, skillfully communicated to the audience.
While her work frequently looks to the culture of the literary, there is often a twist in the tale. For example, the work ‘A Glimpse of Common Territory’ features two fictional 19th-century characters trapped in a modernist tower built to test lifts (elevators) that sits incongruously in the middle of a housing estate in the English Midlands.
When scanning any of the films from her body of work, it is clear how Michelle’s approach to film is an appropriate and exacting strategy. Much of her work uses and draws upon the skills she gained working in the commercial sector—such as working as an editor on news programmes for broadcast television—and, at first glance, her works appear to be and sometimes are—de facto reportage or documentary formats that we all recognise. In most cases, they soon reveal the "spaces in between", whether interrogating the filmic medium itself by breaking with convention or content that heads off in an entirely different direction than the one the viewer may initially expect.
Prism Head meets Atlante
In her project for IN HOUSE, we find Michelle at her freest in a series of splitscreen video works. Here, the works made as a contemplation on Prism Head and Atlante—and an imagined meeting of the two—run into the wild, quite literally. The tangible sensorial experience of the notes in the fragrances comes alive in land and seascapes that are practically scratch ‘n sniff in their immediacy. Through the juxtaposition of images on the same screen we build up a notion of simultaneity and layering that comes with fragrances, perhaps most overt in the imagined meeting of the two fragrances in the third video work in the trilogy.
In many ways, these works bear a direct relationship to her most recent solo show that premiered the work ‘Alternating Routes’ at Tromsø Kunstforening, curated by Leif Magne Tangen, to coincide with the 2024 Tromsø International Film Festival. ‘On Common Ground’ is the film that first saw Michelle Deignan wander into the realms of drama, a 40-minute film that revisits the work of an overlooked German woman writer and her 19th-century travels whose work embodied the spirit of Romanticism (and the challenges women faced, then as now) to be the lairds stewarding the understanding of our shared landscape.
If ‘On Common Grtound’ is primarily a drama where the action focusses on the on-screen relationship between the actors, then perhaps we can understand these works for IN HOUSE as the close-ups that sensorially take us deeper into the natural world that is at the heart of both bodies of work and, indeed, the fragrances themselves. The mist off the sea is practically tangible, the smell of the forest floor veritably in our nostrils…
Michelle invites us to "Inhale"
On one level, Michelle Deignan’s practice maps perfectly onto perfume. It is poetic and sensual. It channels Romanticism’s obsession with what we now call “lived experience” in heightened moments in which our consciousness of the natural world is at the fore; what might be the closest we get to heaven while still alive.
When we are instructed by her films to “inhale” there is a sense of us being invited to do a line of nature and to smell the perfume and to remember to breathe; a clarity that we remain living beings in the present tense who are capable of embracing the beauty of nature while we have our time on this earth.
About Michelle Deignan
Michelle started her education in Dublin in her native Ireland, followed by studies in Scotland (Duncan of Jordanstone, Dundee) and later at Goldsmiths, London. As an academic and lecturer, she has held positions at Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford University, University of Greenwich and MetFilm School and also teaches regularly at NCAD Dublin, University of Sussex, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design and Winchester School of Art in addition to participating in seminars and conferences internationally. Michelle is currently working towards a practice-led PhD at University of the Creative Arts, UK, researching new possibilities of landscape thinking through film.
Her work has been shown internationally in institutional contexts including the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh; Metropolitan Arts Centre, Belfast; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Camden Arts Centre, London; and Vzigalica Gallery, Ljubljana, among others. Her films have also been screened on festival programmes internationally in Austria, France, India, Spain, Cuba, Mexico, Germany, Croatia and Serbia, among many other locations.
You can learn more about Michelle Deignan’s work at her website here.
