Growing up in a protective Newcastle Upon Tyne household, Dean watched a lot of TV. His education was basic and almost devoid of the arts. Thus, literature was something he only learned of as an adult. In the absence of formal literary instruction, Dean’s approach to language was from novel perspective. From a very young age, he began to write as a sort of personal art form, assembling the language into new ambiguous meanings and shapes. His writings are still at the heart of his artistic practice today. Instead of flat black lines, his letters are given solid, physical forms. These works are not intended to be read as words, and one should not get hung up on the search for an exact meaning. His texts, rendered in space, remain an ambivalent series of utterances.

For the work of Dean, reading can, in fact, be interpreted as the act of close inspection. Glancing over these multiple layers of material, his sculptures, photographs, performances and publications evoke a wide range of emotional associations of family, society, expectations, and familial roles or love. The sculptures are made of industrial and ‘common’ materials, like concrete, steel beams, foam tubing and corrugated sheet-metal, but also natural materials like clumps of earth and decaying weeds. At exhibitions, the sculptures are usually accompanied by texts, poetic dialogues or reiterated letter and word combinations. His performances are deeply evocative, sometimes even utilizing disturbing forms of language. He makes use of his voice and words to emotionally move the public, having in the past been bored by performances that slide off.

Dean was not trained as a sculptor: he arrived at it because he wanted his pieces of writing to be as physical as possible. He began to use concrete because it was cheap and straight forward to work with. All that was needed was sand, water, cement and, suddenly, you have created something solid.

Dean’s artistic process is complex, but it always begins with writing. In many cases it starts with a word that is carved into a flat piece of wood. This is then put to together in a corrugated fashion to create a mold, in which the artist pours the concrete. Thus, he takes a specific text that he wished to embody, and creates a physical cast from it. Once that work is made, he responds to its materiality and produces another text. For example, he starts off with a letter L, which he breaks and so it forms an F. With his inability to produce one thing, another thing happens. And so, the work is constantly evolving, being written and re-written simultaneously.

Michael Dean now lives and works in London. In 2019, he had a solo exhibition at the Museo Tamayo, Mexico City. Other solo exhibitions include: Having you on, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, United Kingdom; Teaxths and Angeruage, Portikus, Frankfurt (2017); Sic Glyphs, South London Gallery, London (2016); Lost True Leaves, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2016). In 2017, Dean participated in Skulptur Projekt Münster, and in 2016, was nominated for the Turner Prize.

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