About Karly Michelle
Karly is a mixed media visual artist, researcher and an experienced teacher with her teaching experience spanning from drama and art workshops to master’s level classes. Her academic pursuits have so far culminated in a PhD, researching biography writing by those receiving palliative care and whose interests connect creative meaningful engagement and life story telling. Her work in the leisure and health sector of aged care has a strong focus on meaningful engagement and living well at any age. She has a varied visual arts practice ranging from textile, acrylic, pastel and whatever she can get her hands on, with her work continually returning to two key themes: creative engagement as a form of rest and recovery, and creativity as expression.
Photo by Heidi McKerrow
Artist Statement
My creative engagement has developed slowly and is built on an eclectic theatre foundation that gradually expanded into mixed media visual arts. Creativity is a thread that connects my various life stages and experiences, with creative and artistic expression becoming a life raft during periods of intense chronic ill health, sometimes the only window that can see beyond the immediate experiences and pain. Creativity can be a physical means of rest and recovery, providing a space to engage without a goal of productivity. At other times, creative engagement is a form of personal expression for experiences and feelings that can be difficult to articulate. Each offer a space to experiment and play, sometimes with the two connecting and becoming interwoven. Given the highly feeling nature of my work, I find myself constantly moving between various mediums and materials, adapting to the feelings to express and the feelings of the materials.
Qualifications:
PhD (Public Health), MACP, GradCert Res Methods, GradCert TESOL, BCA (Theatre), Cert IV Leis & Health, Cert IV TAE.
Karly is a mixed media visual artist, teacher and researcher whose career has drawn from and centred around her interest and practice in meaningful, creative engagement.
Her first degree was a Bachelor of Creative Arts (Drama) where she focused on stage management, directing and production elements. She went on to complete a Master of Arts in Church Practice with a focus on art and spirituality, and art in community. This led to the writing and coordinating of two art majors (visual and dramatic) in a Bachelor of Arts for a private tertiary institution and teaching a variety of creativity units, primarily those that incorporated art and spirituality, drama and art appreciation. During these years teaching, Karly began to develop her own mixed media visual arts practice.
Later, in a slight career reposition, Karly went on to complete a Cert IV in Leisure and Health and worked at a couple of aged care facilities in roles designed to deliver meaningful and individually developed programs and activities for residents, working closely with people diagnosed with dementia. In this role, Karly also began to develop an interest in palliative care and after exploring some possibilities in this space, Karly was awarded a PhD scholarship to research the volunteer-facilitated Biography Program offered by Eastern Palliative Care (EPC) to their palliative clients, graduating in 2024 from La Trobe with her interdisciplinary thesis Witnessing the Theatre of Life: The EPC Biography Program and Life Storytelling in Palliative Care. She returned to the leisure and health industry, teaching at Holmesglen in the Cert IV in Leisure and Health, adapting her skills as a teacher to train others to work with those living in aged care encouraging them to facilitate meaningful activity and personalised programs for people no matter their age or abilities.
For nearly her entire adult life, Karly has also been living with the chronic condition fibromyalgia; a long-term condition primarily characterised by unexplained pain throughout her body, brain fog, and insomnia. She was originally diagnosed at age 25 in the year after completing her BCA, although she was likely living with for at least 18months prior to diagnosis. While currently relatively manageable, it does to continue to impact her life and decisions. In the past there have been two particularly intense periods of significant ill-health where she was unable to work or function for numerous years at a time providing a unique relationship with the role of work, relationships and creativity.
Throughout her experience of ill health, Karly has continually drawn on creative engagement as a form of restoration, comfort and expression, something which continues to inform her work and visual arts practice today. Her first solo exhibition, 10 years after her initial fibromyalgia diagnosis, was titled Pieces of Self: Feelings of Fibromyalgia (2015), centred around two creative theme which she has continued to explore and develop in the 10 years since; that of creative practices as restorative engagement (such as meditative and repetitious creative practices) and creativity as an exploration of and method to share her feelings and experiences through art, including using creative practices that are often far less restorative and sometimes outright physically painful. Her mixed media practice now draws on mediums that reflect and respond to how she feels and what she experiences.
During her PhD research, which started in the few months of 2020 just before the covid pandemic, she further solidified how she understood her creative practice as a method of visual, and written, life storytelling. Combined with her work in aged care, particularly with those who have dementia, and those who are receiving palliative care, the research provided an opportunity to explore further the connection between meaningful engagement, creativity and life storytelling.
The opportunity to purchase the Kapi Studio and Art Space business came at a time when Karly was just beginning to consider what her next steps might be and was open to various possibilities. The purchase of a gallery and studio business, particularly in such a beautiful location, was too unique of an opportunity not to follow up. Kapi offers the opportunity to bring together her combined interests and experience in creativity, artistry and teaching to invite others to explore their own creativity (whether ‘artistic’ creativity or not).
PhD Thesis: Witnessing the Theatre of Life: The EPC Biography Program and Life Storytelling in Palliative Care.