Raised in a rural village in Northeast England, Michelle Marie Forrest’s practice is profoundly shaped by an early life of structural precarity. Growing up in homes slated for demolition—followed by an ex-council house her parents proudly bought, built over a filled mine shaft that buckled under the weight of a large, blended family—she experienced instability firsthand. As a sickly child, she observed her parents’ backbreaking labor, mirroring her mother’s ritualistic cleaning and learning to lay bricks with her father as he perpetually reconfigured their home to carve out individual spaces.
As the first in her family to attend higher education, Forrest applied to art school at twenty-seven utilising low-income fee waivers. While saving for her living costs, she trained as a database developer—a role she conceptualised as an electronic form of cleaning and building data structures, creating an anti-Ballardian “High-rise” where residents could be repositioned as equals, transcending class. After graduating with a First-class Degree in Fine Art at thirty, she moved to London to immerse herself in a contemporary art world previously inaccessible to her. While working in the financial district to manage student loans and save for her Master’s, she witnessed the global financial crisis firsthand. This economic instability became a defining undercurrent of her practice. During this period, she produced site-reflective installations in semi-derelict yet wealthy postcodes; works like Still Life and Cleanliness is next to Godliness explored domesticity and the ritual of environmental cleansing.
Financial constraints eventually pulled Forrest back North for a residency, where she began processing the social fallout of the economic crash. Appropriating the commercial term “window dressing” to critique financial illusions, and departing from Louise Bourgeois’s Cell Series, she constructed empty architectural units titled Moratoriums, precariously counterbalancing them as a declaration of a breaking point.
Completing her Master’s at forty, Forrest’s unstable approach to building culminated in Blind Faith. Reflecting on her intense work ethic and her father’s experience of becoming “jiggered”—a regional term which reflected how he was left incapacitated by gruelling physical labor in his fifties—she developed a constellation of installations titled {net, works}, including Concentrate, {a violent intersection}, and Kalopsia. These mirrored the framework outlined in The Promise of a Scattered Methodology, where materials and ideas operate as intentional loops, echoing and returning to themselves as a method for reflection.
By 2024, this methodology expanded into a close collaboration with artist Steve Dutton under the moniker We Are Only Partly Real. Originating from a Spike Island digital commission, their joint practice merges language-based art, moving image, code, and immersive installation to explore unstable realities. Together, they investigate how meaning shifts across bodies, systems, and spaces, staging artworks not as static objects but as dynamic fields where perception is actively reorganised through the interplay of time, materials, and information.
In 2026, Forrest received a late diagnosis of AuDHD following recurring periods of burnout. Recognising this neurological landscape as the root of her restless, iterative methodology, her practice has become defined by a rejection of static, finished structures. Instead, it exists as an accumulation of work in constant flux—a vital framework she describes as essential “for navigating the volatility of socioeconomic systems and their tangible, physical realities.”