The Murder Decoy series were developed from a suite of carved and scorched timber crows first produced and incorporated into larger installations for ‘Conjurings’, 2018 (The Lost Ones, Ballarat), ‘Gothic Beauty’, 2018 (Bendigo Art Gallery) and ‘Feast’, 2019 (Stockroom, Kyneton). Based on rudimentary decoys, they have been devised to expand on archetypal visual language that both compounds and animates the memorial space within my work. For me, they remain an important evolution in my practice, enabling me to blur darker haunting qualities with a degree of ‘decoy gaudiness’.

- Michael Needham

Michael Needham is a Melbourne/Kyneton based visual artist and lecturer whose practice primarily incorporates drawing and sculptural installation. Among other things, Needham’s work explores myth, belief and residual melancholia and its postcolonial incarnations.