The Ruins (Edition 1 of 5) Limited Edition Art Prints

The Ruins stages the strangest act an artist can commit, the burning of her own work. A woman sits at the tideline at dusk, her back to us, and sets her canvas alight on its easel while the sea creeps toward her bare feet. In one hand she holds a bundle of dark red roses, love and mourning at once. She does not flee the fire. She tends it.

Made in the first years of a technology that can conjure any image on command, The Ruins turns its gaze on the maker herself. What becomes of the slow, bodily labour of art when a machine can produce its likeness in seconds. Dole does not answer. He lights the question and lets it burn, beautiful and unresolved, its reflection running toward us across the wet sand like a wound the beach cannot close.

DETAILS

Artwork: The Ruins 2026
Artist: Michael Dole Medium Fine art print on archival stock
Editions: (hand-signed and numbered)
297 x 210 mm, limited to 25 (1 of 25 to 25 of 25)
420 x 297 mm, limited to 25 (1 of 25 to 25 of 25)
594 x 420 mm, limited to 5 (1 of 5 to 5 of 5)
1189 x 841 mm, unique single work (1 of 1)
Framing: Available framed or unframed
Source: work Original artwork, The Impact Series (2026)

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Michael Dole belongs to that rare lineage of artists for whom the made image is less a record than a divining rod, a means of locating the fault lines beneath the visible world. Across three decades and four continents, moving between the film set and the studio, he has built a practice that refuses the easy separation of the beautiful and the urgent. His work does not depict crisis. It lets you feel the ground shift under it. Now working from the Byron Bay Hinterland, he treats his own craft the way he treats landscape, as something that breathes, erodes, and can be remade.

The Impact Series is the fullest expression of this sensibility, a body of work about the forces quietly remaking our world. Where other chapters trace the slow erosion of the earth, The Ruins turns to a nearer upheaval, the sudden reordering of what it means to be an artist, filmmaker and writer in the age of AI. Across all of it Dole returns to a single idea, that the most consequential changes of our age are not loud. They are intimate, unglamorous, and felt first by the few who are paying attention. The figure is present but always turned away, her face withheld, a refusal that turns the viewer from spectator into witness.

Exhibiting locally and internationally and increasingly mentoring a new generation of artists, Dole makes work that meets you where you stand and then, gently, moves the floor. These are not laments so much as meditations, on making and unmaking, on what we keep and what we hand away, on the fragile and stubborn value of a thing made by human hand. They ask very little of you, and everything. Simply that you do not look away.