Score for Surface is an ongoing collaborative proposition by Michelle Mantsio and Phoebe Whitman. The project approaches surface not as a boundary, but as an active site of emergence, encounter, and transformation. Here, the score enables attentiveness – acting as a porous and responsive field through which material, spatial, and temporal conditions are sensed, repeated, annotated and reconfigured. This iteration explores surface in relation to structure as both scaffold and threshold – permeable, unstable, and continually surfacing.
Michelle Mantsio is an artist, designer and lecturer whose practice is research-based. Her focus is at the intersections of body, pattern and repetition through multi-level assemblages. This is explored by developing contemporary art and design projects focused on how the body is implicated through spatio/temporal conditions and its impact on agency, autonomy, connection and becoming. She works within the intersection of art and design through video, installation, performance, textiles, and design.
Michelle has participated in numerous residencies, workshops and thinks tanks, including Room to Create (2018-2021), Yellow Brick (2018), Body as Site (2017), To Note (2015), Always Lift Inkrollers ... (2013) and Future Academy (2006-2008). Michelle has exhibited in Australia and overseas. Most recently Attention Seeker (2022), La Trobe Institute of Art, Petite Miniature Textiles (2022), Wangaratta Art Gallery, Unfinished Business (2018), ACCA, and Nauhaus, (2019) Melbourne Design Festival. Michelle is Coordinator of Design Studios in the Interior Design program at RMIT University. She is a member of research group the Kinomatics Project.
Phoebe Whitman is an artist, designer and educator. Her practice involves painting, sculpture, photography, and installation. Approaching various sites and situations through observation, intervention, arrangement and re-presentation, she engages in processes to incite occurrences and potentialities with surface. Through research, site-writing, studio production, material arrangement, and mark-making, she produces projects exploring the diversity of surfaces for sensation and encounter through ideas of duration, becoming and assemblage. Underlying her work is an interest in materiality approached through experimental, material-led and open-ended processes.
Phoebe studied painting at RMIT, Melbourne, where she completed a BA in Fine Art (Honours) in 1999 and later studied a BD in Interior Design (Honours) in 2005. In 2021 she completed her Doctorate by Research PhD, tilted Surface Encounter. Alongside Phoebe’s full-time academic position at RMIT University, in the School of Architecture and Urban Design, where she is the Program Director of the Interior Design (Honours) program, she has contributed to numerous group exhibitions, symposiums and publications.
