Michele Marcoux is a visual artist based in Edinburgh, Scotland working with painting, drawing, moving image, and found objects to create individual works and installations. Starting with something found, captured, stolen (a place, materials, objects, images from the internet), these artefacts become a way into something else – a hidden narrative, an uncanny synthesis, a physical experience.  She works outdoors and experiments in the studio to unlock meaning and imagination. The results intertwine personal narratives with global ghost stories – our haunted existence in a fragmented world.

Michele grew up as an identical twin in Cleveland in North Eastern Ohio living in California then New York City before moving to Scotland where she still lives. As for many people who migrate, ‘place’, ‘identity’, ‘home’ are not constants but shifting, transitory, even transferable. This is a key idea within her work.

Michele studied Fine Art at Bennington College in Vermont, getting her BA in Fine Art (cum laude) at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. In 2016 Michele completed a Masters of Letters Fine Art Practice (with Distinction) at Glasgow School of Art.

April 2021 Creating a Pandemic Imaginary – In April Michele will undertake a month-long artist’s residency at MERZ Gallery in Sanquhar, Scotland for the research and development of new work. Funded through Creative Scotland’s Open Fund, Creating a Pandemic Imaginary will develop ideas inspired during lockdown. Working in the Scottish landscape and a studio located in disused lemonade factory, Michele will develop painting and drawing ideas using observation and automatic/DADA techniques, expanding and documenting the process with timelapse video.

June – Dec 2021 Ecologies of Displacement – in June Michele will begin a 6 month residency and collaboration with Pakistani artist Farrukh Adnan funded through a British Council and Creative Scotland Connect and Collaborate grant. The residency is also supported by Koel Gallery in Karachi and Summerhall in Edinburgh. Despite the contrasting geographical and cultural landscapes of their origins (Michele is from Cleveland Ohio and Farrukh is from the ancient Punjabi village of Tulumba), they share a mutual search for connections, through dreams, memories and symbolic representations, to the locus of childhood. Reaching across vast and vivid boundaries, bound by the global currents of pandemic and climate catastrophe, they will experiment and grow their practices to create collaborative bodies of work on the urgent theme of “Ecologies of Displacement”. The work will be exhibited at Koel Gallery in Karachi in Jan 2022 and at Summerhall during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August 2022.

Below is a summary of Michele’s recent exhibitions

• 2020 Landscape of Memory, Koel Gallery, Karachi, Pakistan – invited by curator Sana Bilgrami. Online exhibition and three webinars bringing together 5 artists from Pakistan and 5 artists from Scotland.
• 2018 Reuse, Reinvent, Reimagine, Gallery 23 at the Edinburgh Fringe – invited by Curator Dr Julie V. Hansen to create a site-specific work GYRE. Also produced a different iteration of GYRE for TENT Gallery, Edinburgh College of Art at Edinburgh University.
• 2015 Fan of Memory/Profane Illuminations, Hidden Door Art Festival, Edinburgh – selected to create a site-specific installation of hanging glass, collage, moving image and sound.
• 2014 Hag-ridden, Summerhall, Edinburgh- invited by then curator Paul Robertson to create a solo exhibition across 5 rooms of the Lower Church Gallery explorating of female identity as a form of haunting. NY artist Lynne Thermann created sound.

Michele regularly exhibits in group shows in Scotland and in London at Studio 1.1.