“Dream big. There’s no limits. You can do whatever you want. The world is large and amazing. Creativity is what it ultimately means to be human. Embrace what makes you you.”

Michaela Gleave is a Sydney-based contemporary artist who grew up in the small community of Riana and attended Burnie’s pseudo art-school Hellyer College. Her work involves everything from photography, sculpture and video to ‘site specific’ performance art and text-based works where she lights up a sentence in neon.

Michaela Gleave & Kate Mitchell - Wall Work (2010) - credit Jasmin Mak (i) — Michaela Gleave & Kate Mitchell - Wall Work (2010) - credit Jasmin Mak

2010 was a big year for Hellyer alumni in Melbourne. Justin Heazlewood (author of Dream Burnie) was reprising his Songs From The 86 Tram show as The Bedroom Philosopher in the Melbourne Comedy Festival. He remembers picking up a Herald Sun with Michaela on the cover. She and her collaborator Kate Mitchell were part of the edgy Next Wave festival. Their mission in Wall Work was to find locations around the CBD and spend seven hours erecting a dry-stack brick wall only to pack it up again.

The right-wing, working-class journalists didn’t take too kindly to the piece. They hoed the boots in. Still, Justin was proud of a fellow hometown provocateur. Michaela says she is still haunted by the online comments. The real scoop is it’s a thought-provoking work.

Dream Burnie goes brick by brick to unpack the ramifications of experimental performance art in today’s hi-vis landscape.

An exclusive Q&A with the artist herself

Is any publicity good publicity?

Not as far as I'm concerned. It was pretty stressful [The Herald Sun’s take-down of two Sydney artists receiving City of Melbourne funding], though of course the arts community rallied around us. Perhaps that's a positive, in that it reminded people (who care) of how important it is to have art as part of our culture and in our public spaces.

Was it a compliment at all that it received that kind of 'outrage?'

Perhaps? I think our project was just an easy hook for the journalist to get a rise out of people who are already against funding the arts. Perhaps it's a testament to the work that it struck a chord with people, good or bad.

Was there a grander message entailed, or was it more to shake things up a bit?

As always there are many layers. The work was created in response to the festival theme, 'No risk too great.' It was a comment on the risk artists take in pursuing their profession, in terms of lack of financial remuneration and general well-being in a society that for the most part places no value on what artists do.

We'd turn up on site each morning at 7am with our truck full of bricks, build the wall, have lunch and then stack the bricks back on the truck and drive off. There was no evidence of our labour at the end of each day beyond a dew shadow on the ground from that morning. It was a Sisyphean act [a task that can never be completed], demonstrative of the existential nature of life as a human in general and artist in particular.

In choosing red brick there's a couple of readings: on a personal level we're like cartoon characters, constantly slamming our heads against a brick wall in the work that we do; on a societal level the performance questioned the meaning of 'work' in a service-driven economy and was a somewhat nostalgic look back on times when workers actually made things.

The wall itself, being dry stack, was also an inherently risky object. We built it in locations that would disrupt the flow of pedestrian traffic and create a schism in the every day, encouraging audiences to consider their surroundings and everything that we take for granted in the day to day.

Is contemporary art misunderstood often do you think? Does that matter, or is any reaction a good one?

I don't think people should feel the need to 'understand' contemporary art necessarily, as it's primarily about feeling. I do think it's interesting / bizarre that people tend to have strong opinions about contemporary art and feel like they can voice them. As in any field I think there should be room for the whole spectrum.

I often think about maths in this regard. Most people don't understand the pointy end of pure mathematics, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't exist, and people generally don't get angry because they don't understand it.

Did the front page have a big ongoing effect within the festival? Did journalists contact you at the time?

The article was published a couple of months out from the festival, so by the time the work was presented there was no adverse impacts, I don't think, beyond our own anxiety that we might get heckled.

Interestingly, people responded to the performance positively. Old men - who one might imagine would be quite against the idea in theory - turned out to be the target audience. They appreciated what a good job we were doing of the brick laying (perhaps also responding well to young women in overalls) but importantly, I think, genuinely understood the societal comment about the nature of 'work' that we were making.