@kinsman_imal on Space Oddities 2026

Extract from exhibition text for Signal Stations exhibition, April 2026, Corner 7 Camden Gallery, written by the ever excellent Jack Kinsman

Michael’s work is meticulous whimsy. When I look at the oscillating patterns of timber and laminate face-on I am privileged to read the code of a material history that speaks of old cabinets once storing possessions, table tops that once saw food, bed battens that once held sleep. A wave pattern that reads of human engagement once upon a time, now archived in a storage system that maps their finding. That being said, it s a very hard code to read, and much like the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey, to which the work gets its name, you’ll probably walk away from trying to decipher it thinking ‘not sure exactly what’s happened there but something has indeed happened. The notion that memory is both maintained and lost in an archive feels particularly poignant in Michael’s work and the way it is exhibited. In a discussion of where to place the work, a point was brought up regarding how legible it would be against a busy background. The work is a geometry of camouflage, seeking to hide itself in the background noise of the urban environment, an environment increasingly keen on trying to see you. When I look at the work I am reminded of the cracks in my house: The space a carpenter leaves for the ageing shift of a building to settle and where the skirting board has pulled away. I feel like the history of the work’s materials wants to hide and forget, instead, acting as a spatial archive for alternative memories stored in the objects fallen out of our lives, blown and swept into corners, creases and cracks now caught and stored in the oddity of negative space granted by the work’s timber beams and battens.

I think you’ll like the exhibition too, if you’re into that kind of thing.