Michael Dean: The Baltic

Michael Dean brings his iinstallations to BALTIC from 22nd June 2018. 

Dean makes immersive sculptural installations which explore language, intimacy and the politics of being in the world. For the Great Exhibition of the North, Dean will produce a major new commission that responds to BALTIC’s vast Level 3 gallery. Using his own writing as a starting point, Dean gives language material form, creating moulds and casts of words and incorporating pages from his own personal texts and self-published books.

Referring to concrete as a 'democratic ceramic', Dean also uses other inexpensive and readily available materials such as MDF, shuttering ply, sand, steel and corrugated metal to make objects and environments which demonstrate and, in some instances, literally spell out the writing from which the work takes its origin.

Within these installations, Dean plays with the slipperiness of language, combining words and the sculptural possibilities of typography. Battered books and pages are strewn on the floor and dipped in brightly coloured inks, reducing them to petals or contorted muscles. Creating a physical linguistic space, familiar objects are customised with the artist's writings, parasitically permeating the graphic possibilities of coke cans, plastic bags, advertising stickers and scene tape.