Michaela Cullen is an Irish artist and filmmaker based in London. Working across experimental film, photography, sound, writing and sculptural installation, she creates immersive works that move between fiction, folklore, memory and lived experience.

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Her practice explores how meaning is constructed within fragmented social and cultural conditions. Drawing on critical theory, folklore, landscape and everyday experience, she examines how identity, belonging and memory are shaped by collective histories, inherited narratives and contemporary systems of power.

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Current research moves between planetary anxiety, the Anthropocene, horticulture, foraging, body horror and speculative thinking. Grounded in a longstanding engagement with Irish and Celtic mythology and storytelling traditions, her work considers ecological collapse, technological acceleration and social fragmentation alongside alternative ways of understanding our relationship to the living world.

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Increasingly, Cullen is interested in systems of information, encoding and interpretation, and in the relationship between what is visible and the structures operating beneath it. Ideas drawn from cryptography, computation and emerging quantum technologies intersect with older systems of knowledge including folklore, ritual and mythology. Rather than treating these as opposing frameworks, her work considers how different systems encode, transmit and transform knowledge, and how meaning changes according to the structures through which it is read.

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Influenced by thinkers including Zygmunt Bauman, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and Joanna Zylinska, Cullen investigates the tension between individual agency and the social, cultural and material forces that shape contemporary life. Recurring concerns include myth-making, ritual, place, intimacy, collective memory and the persistence of history within the present. Folklore and horror operate as methods for examining contemporary anxieties and contradictions.

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Material experimentation is central to her practice. Organic matter, found objects, moving image and sound are assembled into hybrid forms that can appear simultaneously ancient and speculative. Landscapes, fungi, plant matter and material residues become sites through which ecology, embodiment, technology and belief are brought into relation.

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Her process is research-led and associative. Films develop through non-linear editing, where fragments, repetitions and correspondences gradually reveal conceptual and emotional structures. Sculptural works often operate as narrative artefacts, props, relics or traces from imagined worlds.

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Her experience of neurodivergence also informs her approach to attention, sensory perception, pattern recognition and systems thinking, shaping a methodology based on noticing relationships between seemingly disparate forms of information.

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Across the work, meaning is approached as something unstable, relational and continually being decoded. By tracing connections between ecology, technology, mythology, memory and the body, Cullen asks how we distinguish what the world is from the systems through which we have learned to interpret it.