Michelle has been printing one-off textile pieces for thirty years. She fell in love with the process while studying textiles at Goldsmiths College. She was awarded a Crafts Council Setting-Up Grant in 1996 and, soon after, became a member of Design-Nation. The British Academy commissioned two works by Michelle for their art collection in St James after a recommendation by the late Sir Nicholas Goodison. Paintings in Hospitals also have her work as part of their loan collection.
This will be the third time Michelle has physically exhibited at Collect, as well as virtually during the pandemic. Last year she was one of the selected Collect Open artists. Her textile installation ‘Celebrating What Remains (What you Stole from Me)’ was a project about her mother and Alzheimer’s, which her mother lived with for 13 years. That work recalled items made by her mother as acts of love for family and home. Michelle continues with the theme of memory in her new work for this year’s Collect with Design-Nation.
Michelle prints all her work by hand with eco pigments on natural fabrics such as linen, cotton, silk and wool. Each piece is unique and is printed using a combination of blank screens with hand-cut paper stencils for the flat areas of colour, and photographic screens. The large piece above the fireplace has been printed with 37 separate sections of print and Michelle has mixed a total of 18 colours. She made the decision to stop working with dyes some time ago. This has made the process harder in many ways, as there is a limit to layering pigments on fabric; they sit on the surface and are thicker. The upside is that they are non-toxic and much more light-fast than dyes. Mixing colours can take up to an hour or more each.
Photography is a prominent feature of Michelle’s work. She is often drawn to graphic imagery and pattern that she sources from her surroundings; each edited and enlarged photograph, or section of a photograph, becoming part of an artwork. She is always looking for potential imagery around her and framing it in her mind’s eye. More recently however, Michelle has focused on the personal for her imagery; she took over 400 photographs for her Collect Open project of items from her mother’s sewing cabinet, and nearly as many of her family home and the ornaments within, for this year’s Collect. Designing the composition is a substantial part of her work: drawing by hand, taking and editing photographs in photoshop and getting imagery ‘silk-screen-ready’ is very time consuming.