Michelle Salrin Stitzlein » Ohio Artist Registry

My work is a celebration of pattern, color, texture and imperfection. It is sculpture created entirely with discarded materials depicting abstract imagery inspired by nature or handmade textiles. As a society, we harvest from the earth’s resources to produce wares only to eventually toss them back into the earth in the form of a landfill. As one alternative, I stockpile those items and utilize them to create installations and large scale sculpture.

The Boucherouite Series explores the beauty of handmade objects and vintage textiles such as rag rugs, afghans, quilts and embroideries. The series embraces and magnifies the graphic beauty of crooked seams, of blocks that don’t line up, odd color combinations as well as the mending and patchwork that took place over multiple years of use. In an increasingly measured and homogenized world, I find these “distortions” and “flaws” refreshing to the eye as exquisite and authentic examples of visual character. The oversized and bold pieces of the Boucherouite Series exaggerate the jagged lines, the spacing anomalies and color shifts typically found in stitched, hooked, crocheted, quilted and woven wares. Comprised of hundreds of mass-produced products such as old garden hoses, used electrical cables and outdated computer wires, the series reveals the excesses of our developed and technological world and attempts to weave a contradictory narrative about the concept of “perfection”.

The Fynbos Series is titled after the Protea, a flowering bush found in South Africa, a country known for clever repurposing and imaginative recycling of materials in art and craft. The piece Spring Millet is created with primarily old, used garden hoses. It is inspired by the color, patterns and textures found in nature, and speaks to my concerns about the loss of natural and native habitat. The environmental toll of manufacturing and then disposing of millions of mundane, broken and outdated items into landfills on a daily basis, is overwhelming. As an artist, I create imagery of nature that was perhaps destroyed by the very extraction process of raw resources needed to produce the materials and waste I utilize. This cyclical concept: oil/coal/gas/wood/stone to mass-produced product to landfill waste to artistic depiction is simultaneously disturbing and comforting. Is my work an insult or a tribute to the plants, mosses, lichens, moths, and mushrooms I find so intriguing? I hope that people who experience my work will step away with a renewed resolve to observe and re-evaluate their own patterns of consumerism. As a viewer, the work might catch you off guard and draw you in as a celebration of color, pattern and texture. But after noting the enormous mass of everyday household detritus within the work, hopefully, an awareness settles in that this beauty, and the ease of a life lived with many products, comes at a considerable cost.