The title of this series, For There She Was, comes from the last line of Virginia Woolf ‘s Mrs Dalloway and includes over a hundred embroidered, burned, dyed and collaged images. The series emerged from thinking about all the women who were speaking out about their pain and trauma and refusing to go away.

To summarize this moment, Michele Landel brews natural dyes in her kitchen using organic materials and then dyed small scraps of fabric (a cloth baby diaper, an antique tablecloth, a stained tea towel…) to represent the physicality of womanhood and gender roles. She matched the fabrics with small paper dolls that are actually digitally edited photographs from clothing catalogues to show the commodification and manipulation of women’s stories. To deliberately erase the women, she burned holes in the photographs and repeatedly stitched over their faces and bodies. Yet the women are still there. Their presence is even stronger.