British born artist Michael Pearce has a strong background in scenography, painting and installation art. Although he has lived in California since 1990, his love for Wiltshire and Devon has never left him and has powerfully influenced his work. He received his BA (Hons) from Dartington College of Arts, then left England to come to the US where he was awarded a Masters in Fine Arts in Theatrical Design from the University of Southern California. To support his studies at Dartington he worked as a street circus performer, fire blower and sidewalk performance artist. Recently, he completed a PhD at Plymouth University, England, submitting a dissertation on Neolithic British ritual art and architecture. He is chair of the Art Department at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks.
The paintings and installation pieces that together complete Pearce’s body of work connect him to his childhood experience of stone circles and long barrows and his study of hermeticism and alchemical philosophy. The works are marked by the use of symbolism, male and female imageries and celestial references. The installations echo the stone circles, not only with regard to scale, but also through their focus on alignment. He makes use of natural elements and materials, pebbles and nettle fibres, a decomposed snake. Through the subtle placement of artefacts within the installation, he establishes correspondences between life and death, the masculine and the feminine, the sun and the earth.
He particularly admires the work of artists Joseph Beuys and Robert Smithson and refers to them in his installation work, while his paintings are rooted in the tradition of artists such as Caravaggio, the German artist Cranach (Martin Luther’s good friend), the British artist Francis Bacon. Michael loves the work of the contemporary painter Odd Nerdrum.
A travelling man, he regularly returns to the West of England, where he walks the stone circles, to reconnect his work with his old inspiration. These experiences refresh not only his art but also his teaching, bringing new life to his exchanges with his students. Through imagining the rituals that took place in the Neolithic, before there was any recorded history, he wishes to take us back to the origin of our culture and of civilisation. Expressing correspondences between the Neolithic and contemporary societies, he points a way for art to move forward.
Michael Pearce is an educator and an advocate for public art. At the Kwan Fong Gallery at California Lutheran University, he has curated more than twenty shows, bringing national and international focus to the gallery.
