From ‘The Bone-Tounge Antiphons’

This is a collection of visual poems by Michael Orr. He delights in the experimental and abstract, bridging multiple media and techniques to produce visual poems that are simultaneously paintings, poems and sometimes even performances. Deeply personal, his work expresses the vulnerability of real life, relating to topics of childhood neglect, addiction and mental illness and the ways variant media affect communication. At core, his work is grounded in the joy of creative expression, and its power to bring purpose and sanity out of this mess of existence, at the same time using art to escape. Interlaced with humour, a certain strangeness and the unexpected, Orr’s work exposes the relationship between language, meaning and play. He enjoys working in all formats; however, he is most fond of working with paper, illustration and elements of collage, incorporating rubber stamps, composition, stickers, found photographs, dry transfer and other two-dimensional elements.