Double Rainbow / Michelle Gearin


Newcastle-based artist Michelle Gearin has created expressive and deeply personal works in her solo exhibition Double Rainbow.

Pre-Socratic philosophers theorised that the human’s ability to see was due to “the fire that comes from the eye”, an idea that eyes emit visual fire streams that, when combined with daylight, enable a person to visualise their environment.

Newcastle-based artist Michelle Gearin has created expressive and deeply personal works in her solo exhibition Double Rainbow, which respond to the power of the human eye and the science of optics.

As an autistic artist Gearin’s newly commissioned work reflects the complexity of the eyes as a major component of the artist’s relationship with the world around her.

Pushing her practice into new experimental mediums, including installation, video and sound, Gearin’s work explores the primal human experience of connection and communication through eye contact and the behavioural properties of perceived light.

Her work explores the meteorological phenomenon caused by the reflection, refraction, and dispersion of light within water droplets, known as a rainbow.

Occasionally, light reflects through these droplets twice creating a second arc of reversed colours. For Gearin, this reflected universe symbolises the way she lives in the world and takes in and processes stimuli.


Facilities at Double Rainbow / Michelle Gearin

  • Non Smoking
  • Public Toilet
  • Welcomes and assists people who have challenges with learning, communication, understanding and behaviour. (includes people with autism, intellectual disability, Down syndrome, acquired brain injury (ABI), dyslexia and dementia)
  • Caters for people who use a wheelchair.
  • Caters for people with sufficient mobility to climb a few steps but who would benefit from fixtures to aid balance. (This includes people using walking frames and mobility aids)
  • Caters for people with high support needs who travel with a support person.
  • 90 Hunter Street, Newcastle, 2300
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