Artist Bio
Michelle Merrifield is a South African-born, multidisciplinary artist now living and working in Melbourne, Victoria.
With formal training in Fine Arts and Graphic Design, she began her creative career as an illustrator. After relocating to Australia, her practice evolved to include graphic design, freelance illustration and teaching in both graphic design and ceramics.
Since 2019, Michelle has focused on her ceramics practice, creating expressive, textured, hand-built sculptures, decorated with stains, oxides and glazes, that explore themes of introspection, symbolism, and the natural world.
Her work was awarded the 2021 Small Sculpture Prize at the East Gippsland Art Gallery. In 2025 she was awarded and undertook a 6 month residency Magnify Artist in Residence program at Kingston Arts studios.
She has her first solo exhibition scheduled in November 2025, at the G3 Gallery in Parkdale where she will be exhibiting a new collection of sculptural works.
Artist Statement
There are fish in my work.
I harvest them as though they are waiting. Silent forms holding stories not yet told.
I can’t remember exactly when fish crept into my making. I only know there has always been that curiosity. Ever since I was a child, longing to own a fish tank. I was captivated by their quiet industry and their sense of purpose, as they darted through water. Once, I dropped a small fish, while cleaning its tank. I remember the frantic, slippery motion and its need to return to water, to home. It felt like watching a birth, desperate, urgent, alive.
When I begin forming a hollow fish, that first pocket of air, held and trapped inside, feels like a breath, a pulse of life waiting to be shaped. It’s a beginning. A quiet becoming.
Fish continue to surface in my sculptures, messengers swimming between continents, between people, between worlds. They speak of survival, adaptability, and the invisible currents that connect us. Sometimes they appear alone. Sometimes with human traits. Sometimes held close by human figures, as if part of the same body.
My work explores the emotional and physical distances we carry, grief, hope, longing, change. Each work becomes a quiet container for feeling, for reflection. I work intuitively, letting form emerge through process. Clay remembers touch. It holds gesture. Through it, I trace the fragile connections we share with nature, with ourselves, with one another.
Like fish, we are always moving, always searching for home within the shifting tides.
My sculptures invite a moment of pause, a return to something deep, familiar, and fluid.
