Mia Busby-Wallace
Approaching sculpture in the expanded field to consider concealment and the fragility of what it means to be protected.
Through acts of undoing, interruption and reorientation, I create sculptural installations that destabilise familiar systems of protection and control.
Stainless steel plate, etching ink. 28 x 25 cm
My practice investigates the fragility of systems used to control concealment, particularly the ones we use to feel safe. I am drawn to the notion of the threshold as a physical, psychological and conceptual space that complicates distinctions and boundaries. Through the reorientation of found and fabricated objects, my work seeks to unhinge what is presumed, promised or permanent, and instead linger in an ambiguous and in-between state. Through a process of deconstruction and reconstruction, I create sculptural installations that undermine the functional agency of the devices used to organise, secure and protect.
Hand-bent steel, black ocean murex, cowrie. Dimensions variable.
I consider the physical devices that we use for protection not only through the way they organise space, but also the fact that their protective qualities are deeply psychological and influenced by gesture. The work is interested in the experiential quality of space as much as it is the things that we construct to ‘organise’ it.
‘The gestures that make us conscious of security or freedom are rooted in a profound depth of being’
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
Found cabinet legs, 76.2 cm [internal].
The work draws upon the suburban domestic, the industrial and the organic. Objects linger within a conceptual periphery, their relationship to one another not immediately resolved. Though these references may initially appear disconnected, they are held together through spatial tension, producing an atmosphere that is both familiar and unsettled.
Untitled, 2026.
Found table, pigeon spikes, railing head, found shell.
Isolated and misplaced, the objects retain traces of their original function whilst existing in unstable and unresolved states. Through this process of reorientation, my work mediates vulnerability, anticipation and the conditions of being in-between.
Performance operates as an early tool for meaning-making. Through repetitive gesture and interaction with ephemeral materials, I use the ‘architecture’ of movement to understand spatial tension, classification and constriction. My sculptural practice is understood first as that which is experiential, bodily and relational, and then translated into the found/fabricated object.
