Learn that grief has no timeline and carries no expiration. Feelings, as confusing as they may be, are a valid and necessary part of the healing journey. Begin that journey today with this beautifully illustrated book. The perfect gift for yourself or for anyone experiencing grief. Read more
“An utterly beautiful, heartbreaking yet fulfilling guide to recovery. Each page is impeccably put together. Both the art and the pressed flowers, the origami, are all poetry in their own right. I cried, I smiled, I dreamed.”
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A clarion call to action. Michèle Saint-Michel picks up the shattered pieces to create a mosaic of experiences and memories in brilliant technicolor. Amidst the collection's electric urgency and quantum slipping, these poems illuminate the indomitable spirit of survivors and hint at the transformative power of feminine relationships, art, and music. Brave, devastating, essential.
“A powerful integration of science, art, and emotional exploration elevates this poetry collection. It left a lasting impact on this reader.”
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Using the words of dead poets, this illustrated experimental poetry collection explores the multi-temporalities of healing after trauma. Told through layered imagery, concrete poetry, and illustrated self-portraiture, Saint Agatha Mother Redeemer navigates the unsteady waters of healing after traumatic events and living with PTSD. This beautifully realized art book is 250 pages of full-color illustration peppered with concrete poems.
“Endlessly dense, yet gives the work more than appropriate space as it unfolds throughout. A legitimately fluxus yet uniquely modern ‘text’, I can't possibly say enough positive about it.”
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Michèle Saint-Michel is a filmmaker, intermedia artist, poet, and choreographer based in London. Saint-Michel’s works function as settings, soundtracks, scores, and networks through overlapping layers of imagery, sound, film, textiles, language and movement.
Mixed with the detritus of the natural world (often preserved plants, seeds and insects), her works create digital and physical spaces of layered cross-sections. The superposition of cultural, environmental, and emotional creates a reactive multi-temporal space where new possibilities for connection can be explored.
Saint-Michel takes influence from poetry filmmakers like Margaret Tait and Cecilia Vicuña; experimental filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Nam Jun Paik, Rose Lowder, Peter Rose; and the Fluxus and free jazz movements. Trained in classical ballet and modern dance, and later as a writer, Saint-Michel’s works often focus on creating space in language, movement, moving image, and sculpture to communicate glitching, shifts, and bleeds.
Like water, I believe artists are now challenged to become persistent, erosive, and devastating. And also yielding, restorative, and life-giving. Our storytelling must operate with this same multiplicity and multidimensionality.
My work centers on themes of grief, healing, environmental impermanence, survivorship, womanhood, and experiential time. Through my artistic expression, complexity, nuance, and data points emerge.
Often taking the form of experimental film, installation art, poetic books, choreographies, and Fluxus scores, my works function omni-directionally. By weaving diverse concepts, visuals, sounds, and textures across genres, my work creates multi-temporalities that evoke alternative worlds with their own sense of time and memory.
Message about speaking engagements, collaborations, or performances via the Contact form.
Michèle Saint-Michel is a filmmaker, intermedia artist, poet, and choreographer based in London. She grew up along the rolling hills and river bluffs of the Missouri River in North America’s heartland and now lives in London, steps away from the River Thames.
See her full Artist’s Bio and explore her art films, art books—like Grief is an Origami Swan: An Art Book About Grief—and poetry collections—like Saint Agatha Mother Redeemer, and the accompanying Saint Agatha Mother Redeemer Coloring Book and Liner Notes for Getting Out Without Catching Fire and the accompanying musical album.
Explore selections from: BOOKS // FILMS // SOUNDS or view SELECTED WORKS.
Find an updated list of press, screenings, selections, and commissions.