Michael Dwan

About

Michael Dwan is a London-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice engages with themes of mortality, memory, belonging and time, reconciling the autobiographical with the collective through work grounded in photography. Whilst the image remains central, he investigates the medium’s potential beyond the representational, distinguishing between ‘reality’ as the observable world and ‘real’ as a deeper, subjective truth.

A period of unlearning at the RCA marked the beginning of a shift towards abstraction, allegory, and performance. Seeking to move beyond the traditional limits of the photographic apparatus, he began working across media. These include photogrammetry, printmaking, moving image, painting, and sculptural form: each is employed to extend symbolic resonance and material presence.

From Ireland, Michael has spent much of his life abroad, primarily in the United States and Britain, where he built a creative career in brand advertising before returning to fine art practice. He holds an MBA (Berlin), with a focus on creative leadership.

The featured works are from the Continuum series, which explores ancestral connection across two hundred generations. The imagery interprets temporality through the belief systems, ceremonial landscapes, ritual monuments, mark-making, and artefacts of Neolithic Ireland. The portal is evoked not only as built form but as metaphor: a space of liminality, connecting life and afterlife, self and ancestry, where the veil grows thin. The work confronts the shared inevitability of death, not as crisis, but as sacred threshold, gesturing toward return.

Michael is currently developing work that expands his exploration of ritual and time to include ecological themes, considering the Irish temperate rainforests and their role as living archives of memory, biodiversity, and climate fragility. These sacral environments, desperately remnant in the face of collapse yet central to rewilding efforts, are shaping new directions in his practice.