Michelle Leber - Career Snapshot

Michelle Leber is an award-winning visual artist based on Boon Wurrung Country, living near Warn Marin/Westernport Bay. Her practice centres on analogue collage, repurposing paper in both two- and three-dimensional formats, and extending into light boxes, artist books and large-scale installations.

Her work often interrogates Australian identity and landscape. Commissions include A Show of Hands for Cordite Review (2021), a suite of ten works exploring themes of hysteria, loss, and isolation. A strikingly subdued yet foreboding image was selected for the cover of the Australian Poetry Anthology (2023), and that same work was shortlisted for the Contemporary Collage Magazine Awards (UK).

Over the last five years, collaborations have seen her work exhibited across Australia, the UK, USA, Russia, Peru, and the Czech Republic. As globalisation’s instabilities unfold, she views such exchanges as vital spaces for dialogue and creative renewal. In 2024, her commissioned work Fundraising with Yellowcake, addressing the politics of energy resources, won the acquisitive Trades Hall Art Prize.

In 2025, Michelle presented thirty works documenting fragile environments shaped by time and human impact. This marked a successful solo exhibition as an emerging artist at Galleria Crocodillo, Melbourne

Awards: Winner of the Trades Hall Art Prize, 2024. Shortlisted for the Contemporary Collage Magazine Awards (UK), 2023.

Groups Shows 2020-2025: Australia, the UK, USA, Russia, Peru, and the Czech Republic

Solo Exhibition: Galleria Crocodillo, Melbourne, AUS (2025)

You can find more about my current and previous exhibitions and collaborations on my News page here.

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SHOW OF HANDS

This 10-part series investigates fragmented, often disruptive histories, relinquishing control to offer the human hand a narrative. Commissioned by Cordite as part of their Amble edition. Find four images from this series below.

XYLOGRAPHICA - Reimagining Albrecht Dürer, Artist Book

An experimental non-fiction leporello incorporates the work of Albrecht Dürer by re-forming 15th century narratives into contemporary visual forms. Forty pages allow for thematic discourse into religion, mathematics, the personality of self. This book is a comparative diagnosis between the first woodblocks and 21st century collage. Find 10 pages below; this book was a contender for The Kanyer Art Collection, USA.

WHAT THE BIRDS ARE SAYING

This series is an on-going forum — let the birds speak of human complexity, jeopardy and displacement.