Mik e McShane
Mike McShane’s work probes contemporary mythologies of techno-solutionism with the severed arm of a Gothic sci-fi movie: funny, unsettling, and uncomfortably familiar. Through kinetic sculpture, soft robotics, and self-built vocal mechanisms, he stages the ambivalent urge to humanise our relationships with machines while simultaneously mechanising the relationships we have with each other. He is drawn to this feedback loop—an evolving system that reshapes how we imagine ourselves and our tools, and the kinds of power, fear, and desire that gather around them.
Across the last five years McShane has made repeated prosthetic attempts to mechanically simulate the human larynx, treating voice as an anatomical valve and a cultural sign. Often both crude joke and serious mechanism, these works turn negative space into an acoustic material: resonant cavities, soft silicone folds, and sculpted air pathways become instruments in their own right. He approaches sound sculpturally, tracing the changing architecture of vibration through shaped materials and internal volumes to draw out harmonic frequencies.
Voice, for McShane, is a threshold. The moment a sculpture vocalises, it becomes less “robot” and more chimera—part instrument, part body, part fiction. In this shift, bodies, machines, and sound co-produce meaning, and viewers find themselves oscillating between empathy and suspicion. Humour, and the subversion of anticipation act as catharsis: mechanical gestures echo musical ones, control systems blur with nervous systems, and “machine dreams” emerge—nonverbal attempts at expression that expose the human fragility beneath technological certainty.
2026
Pub 2.0, LAS Gallery, London
2025
Cheapside, Hypha Studios, 1 Poultry, London
LAS Begins, LAS Gallery, London
LAS Trumps, LAS Gallery, London
Eastside Summer Show, Eastside Projects, Birmingham
2024
Floor is lava
Eastside Summer Show, Eastside Projects, Birmingham
2023
Baggage Claim, Staffordshire Street, London
Makers Fair, NEC, Birmingham
Mechanical Techno, Soundings, Worcester
2022
Testing Grounds, Fillet Space, London
Steam conference, STEAMhouse, Birmingham
2021
Old Friends New friends, Collective Ending, London,
Writing Bodies, Slant Events, International,
Have We Met Before? Anteros Art Foundation, Norwich,
Designer, The Time Machine, Keeper Daughter, Touring East Anglia
2019
Text As, Campbell Works, London,
Какие слова? WhichWords?, H.L.A.M. Gallery, Voronezh,
By sea, through space, I search for you, VCSI, Voronezh
The Lark, Deptford X, London,
Absinthe 3, Bricklayers arms, London,
Units of Measure - Take Courage Gallery, London,
2018
Shut Up, Campbell Works Gallery, London,
2017
Fuze, The Yard, London
2016
Going Native, Omelchenko Gallery, Moscow
Hot August Nights, From Across the Pond and Underneath the Algae, DG14 Collective, BLAM Projects, Los Angeles
Designer, Frankenstein The Modern Prometheus, Matchstick Theatre, Shuffle Festival, Tower Hamlets Cemetery, London
Chelsea College of Art Degree show, Pimlico, London
Designer,Frankenstein The Modern Prometheus, Matchstick Theatre, The Winemakers, Farringdon, London
2015
Perceptions (MDCXXXVIII, Collaboration with Video Designer Alex Uragallo,Commissioned for ‘Reflective Conservatoire Conference 2015’, Guildhall, Milton Court, Barbican, London
Aggregate, The Yard, Vauxhall, London
Sculpture Show, Risei Elementary School, Kiyamachi, Kyoto
2014
Konton Chaos, Chitejin Collective, Dead Space Gallery, Kyoto Seika University, Kyoto
Process, Campbell Works Gallery, Stoke Newington, London
Temporary Waves,Thames shoreline, Wapping, London
2013
Interim, Cookhouse Space, Chelsea, London
Central St Martins Foundation Show, Backhill, Clerkenwell, London