Michaela Gleave | Between Us

Michaela Gleave Messages of Hope, Messages of Love 2020.

Michaela Gleave Messages of Hope, Messages of Love 2020. Photo by Dianna Panucchio.

Michaela Gleave | Between Us

Presented in association with Perth Festival.
Contribute to a collaborative poem beamed into the night sky as morse code light signals.

Over the Festival’s closing four nights multiple beams of light will pulse up into the night sky in a powerful and evocative expression of community. And you're invited to be part of it.

Between us is a public art and community engagement project that considers the ‘space between’. Encompassing the micro and macro, personal and public, local and universal, the project engages audiences in a poetic consideration of the spaces that exist between the structures and systems that shape our lives. Between us begins with the intimacy of this proposition and projects it out into the universe, with text generated by the community, translated into Morse code signals that will travel through space and time forever.

Artist Michaela Gleave invites you to respond to the prompt 'Between us' by contributing text that addresses the intimacy and complexity of the space between 'you and I', or 'us'. A dedicated webpage collects the growing archive of responses, the text accumulating and building over time to form the collaborated poem at the centre of the work. This poem is translated into the Morse code language of pulses and pause, to be beamed up into the sky as light signals leaving Earth to continue its conversation across space, time, light and distance.

Join us from 8pm, Friday 3 – Monday 6 March as The Art Gallery of Western Australia rooftop becomes the launching place for this epic light installation. Visible within 5-7km of the site (weather dependant) the Morse code will be transmitted through physical and digital space, the light installation streamed as live video with Morse code audio and text subtitles, allowing audiences to share and access the work across locations, time zones, and via multiple translations and media.

Between us continues artist Michaela Gleave’s interest in connecting intimate experience with cosmological expression. It builds on previous works involving light and messaging in public space and references in particular Messages of hope, messages of love, a public art project conceived in response to the COVID-19 pandemic that invited audiences to share messages of hope and love via Morse code and live video stream. 

For more information please visit perthfestival.com.au.

Related Information

8pm-12am Friday 3 – Monday 6 March 2023

AGWA Rooftop

FREE | bookings essential

Send a message into the stars

You’re invited to respond to the prompt Between us by filling out the form at the Perth Festival website. You can also select the date you want your message to appear.

Artist Michaela Gleave encourages you to think about addressing the intimacy, and complexity of the space between 'you and I', or 'us'. The responses received accumulate and build over time and will be woven into a poem and translated into morse code before being transmitted into the stars from the rooftop of AGWA.

If your submission is selected, you will receive an email confirming the time and date that your message will be played, which you can experience in person or online via live stream. Send a message into the stars here.

About the artist

Michaela Gleave is an Australian born artist based in Gadigal/Wangal country, Sydney, Australia. Her conceptual practice spans numerous mediums and platforms including digital and online works, installation, performance, photography, sculpture and video. Her projects question the nature of reality and our innate relationship to time, matter, and space, focussing particularly on the changing intersections between art, science and society. Michaela’s work has been presented extensively across Australia as well as in Germany, Greece, the United Kingdom, Austria, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, Iceland, the United States and Mexico. She has developed major performance and installation works for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Dark Mofo Festival, Hobart; Fremantle Arts Centre, Perth; Bristol Biennial, UK; TarraWarra Art Museum, Melbourne; Carriageworks, Sydney; and Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne among others. She has been awarded residencies at the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York City, Tokyo Wonder Site in Japan, and CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science, Australia. In 2015 Michaela won the Churchie National Emerging Art Prize. and was awarded a prestigious Creative Australia Fellowship in 2013. Permanent installations of her work have been commissioned by Bendigo Art Gallery, VIC, Salamanca Arts Centre, TAS and The Rechabite, WA.

Artistic Credits

Artist Michaela Gleave

Lighting design Bosco Shaw

Programming Warren Armstrong

This project builds upon elements of the previous work 'Messages of Hope, Messages of Love' created in collaboration with Fausto Brusamolino.

Presented in association with

Perth Festival supported by

Wesfarmers Arts logo City of Perth logo

On Saturday 27 August, the Gallery is open 10am-3pm only as we prepare for the AGWA Foundation Gala supporting women in the arts. Some exhibition access will be disrupted with two Tracks We Share ground floor galleries closed. AGWA Rooftop bar will be closed, reopening at 2pm Sunday.

Details