Michele Landel creates beautifully eerie patchwork paintings using photographs, fabric, paper, and thread. Whether draped or flattened, her embroidered bedsheets are about engaging the need and desire to look and the inherent power struggle between the one looking and the one being looked at. She stitches over figures, cut flowers, and domesticated spaces to evoke symbols of power, loss, memory, and women's struggles. Mirroring and shadows are also often repeated to show self-awareness and internal worlds. Drawing on the intimacy associated with stained and mended secondhand bedsheets and the machine embroidery connected with craft, her artwork references the domestic while also deliberately distancing itself from traditional fiber arts. In her recent series, Michele has drawn upon Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness novels as a common thread. Both explore the politics of power, wedging the female perspective into a world seemingly only validated by men.
Michele is an American artist who lives and works in Sèvres, France. She holds degrees in Fine Arts and Art History. Her artwork has been exhibited throughout Europe, the UK, and the US and appears in The Collage Ideas Book (Ilex Press, 2018). She was awarded the 2018 Innovative Technique Award by the Surface Design Association and was a finalist for the Prix Carré-Sur-Seine in 2020.