View Exhibition: https://bloomfieldartgallery.com.au/everyday-immanence-by-michaela-james/

Winner of the 2025 Central Coast Artist of the Year we are pleased to feature Michaela’s solo exhibition, ‘everyday immanence’.

You don’t need grandeur to find beauty. You don’t need to escape to find meaning. It’s right there, in your own life and your own surroundings.

Because ordinary things, transformed through painting, can become something much more. That transformation—that moment where the mundane becomes something interesting—that’s what I’m always chasing.

Everything—objects, space, background—blends together on one surface, where any part can connect to any other. I try to listen to what the everyday already tells me—not painting what something is, but what it does, how it feels, how it changes. I see it as a reflection on how the ordinary can hold rich, shifting possibilities, and how painting can reveal that.

My focus is on painting familiar, often-overlooked objects—cups, fruit, light through glass—not to elevate them, but let everything coexist without hierarchy, continuously forming and informing in relation to one another.

This project continues my exploration of immanence: the idea that meaning and affect are already embedded in the material world.