Michele Landel is visually exploring how opposing female stereotypes can exist in one body and the inherent tension of this dichotomy. To do this, she has created and photographed female scarecrows made out of papier-mâché and her own clothing. She was drawn to this figure because the scarecrow is both deceptive and protective. It is meant to scare but is also seen as dutiful and loyal. Scarecrows are created from cast-offs and yet set up on cultivated land to prevent the incursion of the wild.

Inspired by the Greeks' use of birds to both symbolize peace and foreshadow bad omens, she has given her female scarecrows bird heads. The shape of the heads was inspired by the masks of the lost tribes of Tierra del Fuego, the Dada artists Hanna Höch, Mary Wigman, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and the contemporary artist Anthea Hamilton performance The Squash. By drawing on these sources and merging fairy tales and myths, Landel is fabricating a contemporary narrative about female roles and relationships.

"What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies."

— Margaret Atwood (The Blind Assassin)