The Calling

Artist Michael Dole is a rare hybrid of director, filmmaker and artist whose practice has unfolded over more than three decades and across four continents. Now based in the Byron Bay Hinterland, he moves fluently between set and studio, allowing each discipline to infect the other. His films carry the stillness and compositional rigour of painting, while his paintings feel charged with the tempo, rhythm and emotional cadence of cinema. The result is a body of work preoccupied less with spectacle than with the subtle pressure points of lived experience – the quiet, often overlooked moments where a life tilts.

Critically, Dole’s work resists cynicism. Whether he is collaborating with global musicians or developing intimate fine art series, his focus remains on the inter lives of people and the worlds they inhabit. Exhibiting locally and internationally, and increasingly mentoring the next generation of image-makers, he uses each project as an inquiry into how we see and how we are seen. At the core of his practice is a insightful, demanding ambition. To create work that meets people where they are, tells the truth about being human and stays with you long after you have walked away.