Michele Landel

Michele Landel creates intensely textured and airy collages using burned, quilted, and embroidered photographs and paper to explore the themes of exposure, absence, and memory. She manually manipulates digital photographs to highlight the way images hide and filter the truth. She then sews layers of paper together to create bandages and veils and to transform images into fragile maps.

Of her work. “C’mon, Get Up,” Michele says, “[This piece] is a highly personal biographical work of art and a commentary on a universal female experience. Started in early 2020, ‘C’mon. Get up.’ was completed in the suburbs of Paris during France’s eight-week confinement relating to the COVID-19 virus. It is not that the rock is impossible to carry, but with her hands at her side and nothing under her eerie smile, the woman embroidered onto the bedsheets is unable to pick up the rock and move. Instead, she greets the viewer with an empty stare and vague smile as if everything is fine, she is not lying on the ground, and the rock is not there.

The title of this series, ‘For There She Was’, comes from the last line of Virginia Woolf ‘s Mrs. Dalloway and includes over a hundred embroidered, burned, dyed and collaged images. The series emerged from thinking about the #metoo movement - all of the women who were speaking out about their pain and trauma and refusing to go away.”

Michele is an American artist living and working in Sèvres, France, and out of her art studio in the Paris 9th arrondissement. She is currently represented by the Muriel Guepin Gallery in NYC, NY, Le Salon Vert in Geneva, Switzerland, and the Ségolène Brossette Galerie in Paris, France.