Stitched Memory: Between Matter and Body. Interview with Artist Michelle Alexander

In Michelle Alexander’s work, artistic practice becomes a visceral and layered process, where body, gesture, and memory intertwine in a visual language that is deeply autobiographical and yet open to collective experience. The artist moves fluidly between photography, drawing, sewing, and painting — not seeking a polished blend of media, but allowing friction, rupture, and vulnerability to emerge.

“Layering helps things build slowly. It feels closer to how memory and trauma work: never clean, never all at once”, she explains. Her work begins with the body — the skin as an emotional surface — and with materials that evoke intimacy and discomfort. Scraps, stitches, broken lines become traces of what has been hurt, forgotten, or pieced back together.

And gesture becomes ritual, though never peaceful: “When I’m stitching, stapling or layering images, there’s a rhythm that helps me sit with things instead of trying to escape them. It’s meditative, but it also comes from anxiety, pressure, and feeling like I keep making the same mistakes”.

She recently curated an exhibition titled Connective Thread with Ivory Gate Gallery in Chicago; in this conversation, Alexander reflects on how art can offer a space to stay inside complexity without needing answers, transforming fragility into a possibility for connection.

Your works combine painting, photography, drawing, and sewing. How do these media interact in your art?

These media are tools that let me think with my hands. They each carry different emotional weights. Photography holds presence and absence. It feels raw and vulnerable, but is also completely untrustworthy and deceiving. Drawing is immediate, reactive, and instinctual.

It comes before language. Sewing holds a duality, too, communicating both care and violence. I use these methods in layers, building surfaces the way memory, trauma, and anxiety accumulate. The interaction is not about blending media cleanly but about allowing friction, interruption, and vulnerability to surface.

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