Liner Notes for Getting Out Without Catching Fire

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 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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Saint Agatha Mother Redeemer

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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work

Michèle Saint-Michel is a filmmaker, intermedia artist, and poet based in New York. She makes work around issues of power, feminist ecologies, somatic memory, and quantum mechanics.

Saint-Michel is interested in our rhizomatic metaphysics. Media as poetic is mixed with the natural world (often preserved plants, seeds and insects), giving audiences of her films, books, installations and poetic sculptures new eyes and expanded vocabularies. The superposition of cultural, environmental, and emotional creates a reactive multi-temporal space where futures of care can be imagined.

Trained in classical ballet and modern dance, and later as a writer and filmmaker, Saint-Michel’s works often use language, moving image, somatic movement, sound work, and sculpture to explore healing and healthy coping.

Wide-ranging influences include poetry filmmakers Margaret Tait, Cecilia Vicuña; experimental filmmakers Stan Brakhage, Nam Jun Paik, Rose Lowder, Antoinetta Angelidi; artist musicians Laurie Andersen, Yoko Ono, Daniel Johnston, PJ Harvey; poets Wisława Szymborska, CA Conrad, Patti Smith; choreographers Deborah Hay, Merce Cunningham, Blondell Cummings; and the Fluxus and free jazz movements.

view cv and past works

artist statement

Like water, I believe artists are now challenged to become persistent, erosive, and devastating. At the same time, we must be yielding, restorative, and life-giving. Our works must operate with entangled multiplicity.

Often taking shape as experimental film, installation, poetic books, choreographies, and Fluxus scores, my works are quantum functions. By layering diverse concepts, visuals, sounds, and textures across genres, my works evoke their own sense of being, knowing, time, and space.

Beginning with granular texts and words, I pull the lens back to reveal landscapes and ontologies ripe for exploration.

Message about speaking engagements, collaborations, or performances via the Contact form.

bio

Michèle Saint-Michel is a filmmaker, intermedia artist, and poet based in London. She grew up along the rolling hills and river bluffs of the Missouri River in North America’s heartland. She attended Goldsmiths College in London and currently resides in Brooklyn, NY.

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.