The Australian artist and corsetry designer turns the city into a stage for a series of raw, humorous and defiantly uncensored actions, transforming the classic pin up into a space of autonomy and play.
In ‘Spread Across London 2026’, Michaela Stark lifts the calendar format out of its long history of hyper polished eroticism and places it firmly within her own language of body morphing. The calendar grew out of her encounter with Leigh Bowery at Tate Modern, where she recognised a shared devotion to irreverence, experimentation and pleasure in the act of making. Rather than reproducing Bowery’s aesthetics, Stark absorbs his spirit of joyful excess, stepping into the streets of her adopted city with a small team to perform moments that are deliberately imperfect, deliberately alive.
Stark’s practice spans couture corsetry, photography, performance and self portraiture, but the calendar becomes a freer space where she can loosen the constraints of meticulous craftsmanship. The images chart a journey across London: sprawled on a double decker bus, looped around a De Beauvoir Town telephone box, pedalling a Lime bike through East London, or offering a deadpan middle finger to Parliament. Each month captures a different collision between her sculpted silhouette and the city’s architecture, held somewhere between vulnerability and theatricality.
There is a political charge to this openness. Stark speaks openly about online censorship and the relentless policing of women’s bodies on social media, where her images are regularly removed. Taking her performances offline allowed her to inhabit her body without algorithmic scrutiny. Shooting naked or almost naked in public became a way of reclaiming space for herself and her community, and of testing how joy, humour and exposure can coexist in a climate increasingly shaped by misogyny and fear.
‘Spread Across London 2026’ also continues a tradition she began three years ago, offering her audience a slower, tangible entry into her work. It is a chance to own a full year of uncensored images, created with friends and collaborators who help her carve out these fleeting, powerful moments. As Stark puts it, the calendar is ultimately about rediscovering the pleasure in her practice, one piece of boning and one London landmark at a time.
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