Michele Landel works with flowers from her own garden, photographing bouquets as they fade and multiplying the images to create a blurred, vibrant effect. Printed on bed linen, the photographs are fixed with wax, then sewn and embroidered into layered paintings. The stitching is treated like paint, structuring and mapping the surfaces while imparting a subtle movement.
Through textiles and embroidery—materials long associated with women’s lives—the artist explores beauty, impermanence, and the quiet transformations of domestic life and motherhood. The flowers from her back garden become a way to reflect on the passage of time, the growth of her children into adolescence, and the silent transformations of daily life. Each flower captured is an attempt to hold onto a fleeting moment. She knows that the rosebush will bloom again, the peony will return, but never quite in the same way. Each year’s flowers are ephemeral, impossible to preserve, and it is precisely this transience that makes them beautiful. She looks at them with tenderness, fully aware that everything changes inevitably.
by Françoise Mamie, 2025