Michael Petchkovsky is a Blue Mountains based artist with a background in Jewellery and Object Design, having studied at the JOD department of Sydney College of the Arts in the 1990s. He returned to SCA to undertake postgraduate studies in 2012, completed a Master of Studio Art and is currently working through a Master of Fine Arts. The jeweller’s sensibility for materials and intimate, intricate methods of object fabrication, craft, carry through in his current practice which involves exploring electricity for creative potential. Whether hacking and repurposing e-waste, building circuits from scratch, bending display technology, welding, soldering or recording analogue signals – he is in his element at the jeweller’s bench or snitching time in a well equipped workshop.

“When Julie asked artists to reinterpret their earliest works I immediately thought of a drawing I’d made aged 3. It’s a diagram explaining how ‘when I grow up’ I would redesign this toy plastic birdie adding clockwork and a wind-up mechanism to bring it to life… Pygmalion, Hephaestus, and Frankenstein were unknown to me then. It’s interesting and surprising to note a consistent thread running through life. I don’t know if my current work realises the childhood dream but I continue to sketch out elaborate designs and find fascination in notions of animism and the (in)animate. Someone once told me we are all walking backwards into the future”.