Micheal McCabe

INFO

Name	Micheal McCabe (he/him)
Also known as	Micheal Michael McCabe
Born	1994
Country of Birth	Aotearoa
Place of Residence	Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland
Ethnicities	Filipino, Pākehā
Artform	Design, Architecture, Theatre, Visual arts, Craft/Object
Decades Active	2010s, 2020s

ABOUT

Micheal McCabe is an interdisciplinary designer and educator whose output includes design work for exhibitions, performance, and public installations. Across these different forms, his work is audience-led, exploring how constructed space shapes human interaction while uplifting the work of his collaborators, as well as being centred in a consideration of environmental and social architectural responsibility. His work often features unexpected details like the incorporation of warm, curvy and domestic elements in cold public spaces, or the use of unexpected materials that, in turn, point towards the deeper conversations sitting beneath the work.

Born and raised in Whangārei, McCabe studied sculpture, painting and photography throughout high school and was involved in the local youth theatre company. “Within an all-boys school in Northland,” he has said, “[theatre] felt like a refuge.”

McCabe moved to Tāmaki Makaurau in 2012 for university where he trained as an architect. Much of his early work was through Satellites, a production house working with Asian diaspora artists in Tāmaki Makaurau to create temporary participatory public installations. Through this collaboration, he worked on projects like The Fortune Cookie Cart (2017), an interactive experience inviting people to share advice with a stranger, The Claw (2018), a gigantic claw machine inviting members of the public to ‘win’ a work by artist Hanna Shim and Twin Cultivation (2022), a public garden-like structure inviting strangers to harvest a ceramic vegetable to gift to one another.

He frequently collaborates with organisations like Objectspace, The Dowse Art Museum, Art Week Auckland, Proudly Asian Theatre, and Massive Theatre Company, and has worked as set designer on shows like A Fine Balance (Auckland Theatre Company, 2019), Sightings (Massive Company, 2018) and Pinay (Proudly Asian Theatre, 2021) and as an exhibition designer for the Queer Pavilion (Auckland Pride Festival, 2020), A Stone, an Echo, a Sign; Aotearoa Jewellery Triennial (Objectspace, 2022), twisting, turning, winding: takatāpui + queer objects (Objectspace, 2022) and Hīnātore: A Love Story: Ron Te Kawa (Objectspace & CoCA, 2021).

In 2022, McCabe was selected as part of the creative team for the New Zealand pavilion at The Prague Quadrennial 2023 and in 2023, was commissioned as an artist in the group show, In Place. Presented at Season Aotearoa this show brought together five early-career designers each exploring “the nuance and multiplicity of diasporic identities.” McCabe’s work, A life in pigs, or, pigs in my life (2023) recreated a cluster of baboy sulop, an endemic species of pig to the Visayan region of the Philippines, using coffee biomaterial. “The now endangered baboy sulop,” he wrote in the catalogue, “Can be thought of as a harbinger for ecological loss and what it means for the futures of those belonging to it.

McCabe graduated with a Master of Architecture (MArch(Prof)) from The University of Auckland, where his thesis explored the architecture of queer nightclubs in Tāmaki Makaurau and the responsibility of the architect in designing queer spaces. He is currently a lecturer of Architecture at the AUT School of Future Environments and is a Capricorn Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus and Mars.