Michele Heather Pollock is a new resident of Brown County,
having moved from Minnesota in 2007. Her in-home studio, Lost Lake Studio,
features paper based art, including two-dimensional and three-dimensional
collages and shadow boxes, handmade books, bookmarks and cards.
Michele came to art through an unusual path – she holds a BS in Chemical
Engineering from Purdue, and worked for 10 years as a research scientist. She
received an MFA in Creative Writing from Hamline University in Minnesota in
2006. She writes poetry and remains interested in scientific ideas, drawing upon
both in her visual artwork. She studied hand bookbinding and letterpress
printing at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts and has studied with various
surface design and book artists, including Barbara Lee Smith and Ed Hutchins.
As a child Michele spent a lot of time with either needle and thread or
scissors and paper. For many years she abandoned stitching and embroidery work
to focus on paper-based art, but recently she has reconciled the two art forms,
combining paper collage with machine stitching and hand embroidery to create
novel “paper quilts.” This work blurs the lines between textile and paper art,
and often, when original poetry is included in the work, blurs the line between
literature and visual art.
Michele finds inspiration in the patterns and colors in nature, as well as in
her original poetry and the concepts and language of science. She has developed
three-dimensional book structures and worked with moveable parts and pop-ups in
books, and has combined original digital photos with poetry in her artwork.
Her one-of-a-kind artist books, collages and
three-dimensional shadow boxes
have appeared nationally in juried exhibitions.
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