Artist Statement
Michele Landel maps the intimate spaces between the body and the home by creating patchwork photographs using reclaimed bed linens. Machine embroidery traces thin, irregular lines—part scar, part map—across the surface, making the familiar feel unstable. In a culture saturated with manipulated images and curated illusions, she leans into rupture, stitching intimacy back in through labor, slowness, and touch.
Whether draped or flattened, her embroidered bed sheets engage the need and desire to see ourselves in others, 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, and memory—deploying mirrors and shadows to surface self-awareness and internal worlds. Drawing on the intimacy of mending, her work references the domestic while deliberately distancing itself from traditional fiber arts.
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 Le fil dans l'art contemporain: 125 artistes au coeur de la création (Pyramyd Editions, 2026) and 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 at Galerie Amélie du Chalard, Le Salon Vert Galerie, Ségolène Brossette Galerie, and Donna Seager Fine Arts.
Michele Landel embroiders photographs on old stiff bed sheets similar to those found in the creaky cupboards of family homes. Figures, flowers, bottles... At first glance, nothing too shocking. Up close, however, the flowers wilt and the eyes recede, the colors fade and shapes disappear – all seem to be visibly threatened, if not already gone. Everywhere in her photographs mystery hovers and uncertainty lurks.Threads chosen tone-on-tone from an muted palette becomes both a medium of connection and disintegration, puncturing the plane in a dance of scars and sutures and turning faceless silhouettes into something akin to voodoo effigies. Michele Landel deliberately uses whatever domestic tools are at hand; an iron and butcher's paper are used to transfer portraits and still lifes onto fabric before stitching them together with a sewing machine – the sturdy instrument of progress that mechanized an ancestral gesture, a woman's gesture, the perfect housewife’s gesture. Her needlework on bed linen evokes the dull rhythm of everyday life, the monotony of a prolonged stay within four walls. House arrest, then, but there's also a sense of independence, this tug-of-war with memories and emotions between the stitches and stains. Textiles and politics are intertwined in these patchworks, inspired by the writings of Virginia Woolf and poems by Emily Dickinson and Mary Oliver. For they constantly reiterate the prevented history of the second sex.
Virginie Huet