The Ruins (Edition 4 of 5) Limited Edition Art Prints

This edition of The Ruins is the closest and quietest, a study of a shoulder, a collarbone and the nape of a neck, lit gold by a fire we see only at the frame's edge, a thread of smoke crossing cool blue air. The body is reduced to landscape here, skin catching the last warmth as the light goes.

When the made object burns, what remains is the maker's own body, the breath, the warmth, the irreducibly human thing no machine can be. Dole finds his argument in the smallest frame, that whatever the tools become, the source of art was always a living, particular body, this near and this real.

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.