Michael Webster

Lives and works in Spartanburg, SC, USA

Artist statement

Through projects that span sculpture, archives, and cartographic impulses, I respond to the becomings and undoings of space. Maps present the illusion of a static world entombed by the grid, a conception of space as mathematical. Instead, my work begins with a social conception of space, where shifting territorial boundaries form strata between people. I seek moments where boundaries become permeable – a place where architecture dissolves into raw matter or the surveyor’s tools encode a digital artifact. By finding residues where systems are revealed, I question the processes of demarcation and displacement that inscribe sites of contention on the land. My practice is responsive at its core. Rather than invent new images, I recontextualize things already in circulation or develop site-specific, participatory projects. Sometimes I will live with an object for a decade before I can meet it on its own terms. This responsiveness acknowledges social and material agency outside of myself and ultimately makes my practice a symbiotic one. Other people and other things offer many insights about living in fractured geographies. Their faint echoes reverberate through every space, carrying layered histories to anyone willing to listen. I work in the amplification of echoes.

Artwork