Michele Landel disrupts traditional painting by dismantling its boundaries—merging photography, embroidery, and reclaimed textiles into a new visual language. With thread, wax, and image, she reconstructs and transforms domestic interiors into fragile, fractured memories.
Machine embroidery traces thin, irregular lines—part scar, part map—across the surface. Flowers collapse. Shadows multiply. Objects shift and vibrate. What once felt familiar becomes unstable. In a culture saturated with manipulated images and curated illusions, she leans into rupture. Walter Benjamin warned of the aura lost through endless reproduction; Landel stitches it back in, drawing on the intimacy of embroidery and mending—through labor, slowness, and touch.
These are not pristine images. They are disrupted, broken, stitched-over inner landscapes. Landel reclaims the handmade as a challenge to the polished, the fast, and the fake.
Bio
Michele Landel 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. She has held residencies at Joya: AiR in Spain, NG Creative Art Residency in France, and the Centre Pompadour Neofeminist Laboratory in France.
Her artwork is currently available through Galerie Amélie du Chalard and the Ségolène Brossette Galerie in Paris, France, Le Salon Vert Galerie in Geneva, Switzerland, and Donna Seager Fine Arts in Mill Valley, CA.