
Michaela Younge’s tableaux are dense with detail. The walls are patterned, the floors tiled. There are candlesticks and pot plants and empty beer bottles, trinkets, posters, neon signs. She meticulously pricks and sticks each scene into shape, working dyed Merino wool into a felt backing with a barbed needle; stabbing death and drama into its very fibre. Younge’s felt compositions are darkly hedonistic, with bare legs and bars, cars and cowboys, pin-up girls and cut-out ones. Unlikely objects coincide in unexpected scenes: a small-town strip mall, a supermarket, a school gymnasium. Nothing is as it seems. The artist’s characters appear as actors in an obscure play, the scenes painted sets on which they perform.