Marion Michell is an artist whose practice explores personal childhood experiences and anxieties in adolescence. Born and raised in Germany, she moves between languages and works across various media, often blurring together physical experiences, and memories, as well as moods and atmospheres, interwoven with elements from myths and fairy tales.
Michell studied Critical Fine Art Practice at Central St. Martins School of Art and Design in London. Her art is a delicate and evocative exploration of childhood, memory, and the anxieties that shape our early experiences. Her work blurs the boundaries between the physical and emotional, transforming fragments of memory and fleeting sensations into intricate, often unsettling creations. Rather than focusing on concrete recollections, Michell delves into the moods and atmospheres of childhood, capturing the intangible, the ineffable, and the deeply personal elements of growing up.
Drawing inspiration from myths, fairy tales, and the intimate world of craft traditionally associated with femininity, Michell works with materials such as paper, wool, and artificial hair to create shoes, figures, and dresses. These objects, crafted by hand, often incorporate found items that she reimagines into pieces that convey emotional depth and fantastical narratives. Each artwork is a portal to a new set of feelings and desires, blending innocence with raw instinct, and exploring the contrast between pleasure and pain, desire and fear.
Michell creates a world where innocence alludes to darker, more complex and scary subtexts often layered in a fairy story, or Grimm’s tales and Greek myths, offering a striking reflection on the emotional landscape of growing up.
By incorporating artificial hair as a medium, she explores the association with ideal beauty, mostly taken from childhood fairy tales. She describes hair as the stuff of myths and tales, norms and notions, pleasure and anxiety, all of which appear into daily experience. As a material, hair evokes instincts and desire, and makes an interesting focus to explore themes around the female body and female identity. She investigates how women’s hair, especially body hair, is often fraught with cultural associations which veer almost violently between idealisation and degradation.
Between a whisper and a hiss – Hairy things and steps and stitches was the artists first solo exhibition. The show at The Art House also included the presentation of her film “Lying low and reaching high: On practising art and living with ME“.
