BIOGRAPHY
Michelle Hinebrook received her MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art and her BFA in Art & Design from the College for Creative Studies. An interdisciplinary artist and resident artist at XO Projects, her work has been featured in 18 solo exhibitions and more than 50 group exhibitions internationally and is represented in numerous public and corporate collections.
In addition to her studio practice, Hinebrook has built an extensive career as a curator, visiting artist, critic, and educator. She has held teaching and professional engagements at institutions including Pratt Institute, Parsons School of Design, College Art Association, University of Michigan, and UrbanGlass, among others. She currently serves as a professor at Pratt Institute and as Director of Artful Edge Academy.
Hinebrook has participated in numerous artist residencies and educational programs, including those at Penland School of Craft, Snow Farm, Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, and Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. Her exhibition and curatorial work have been presented at venues such as Cranbrook Art Museum, Detroit Institute of Arts, Nancy Margolis Gallery, Foley Gallery, FORMah Gallery, and Marlborough Gallery, among many others.
Her work has been recognized through awards and grants from the Polk Foundation, Arts for Justice Fund, C.E.R. Fund, as well as additional institutional and private support.
STATEMENT
My painting practice synthesizes multiple ways of seeing, sensing, and understanding the world. Through intuitive, emotional, and synesthetic states of consciousness, I explore the fluid nature of reality and the unseen dimensions of human experience. My work investigates how perception shapes our understanding of the world and how invisible psychological, sensory, ecological, and energetic experiences become visible through painting.
Paintings can be spaces where different forms of experience—memory, perception, emotion, sensation, energy, consciousness, and nature—merge together. The paintings reflect an interior perspective of life, including thoughts, beliefs, emotions, spirit, and physical sensation. I work with multiple ways of seeing and knowing to understand the nature of reality as layers of perceptual, intuitive, somatic, symbolic, visionary, and emotional experiences. Through a visual language that merges abstraction, figuration, organic form, and spirit, I create layered compositions where figures, botanical structures, symbolic imagery, and fluid fields of color emerge as expressions of psychological, emotional, and ecological interconnection.
Working between intuition and observation, I explore the relationships between the visible world and internal human experience. The canvas presents the space between inner and outer worlds, the personal and collective, the human and natural, and the visible and invisible.
My research is guided by a deep curiosity about human perception, extrasensory experience, and our interconnection with nature and consciousness, shaped by memory, sensation, and subtle energies.
My practice weaves materiality and spiritual inquiry, drawing from mystical, metaphysical, and mythological histories, energy healing and visionary practices, and diverse spiritual philosophies. My work investigates patterns and systems in nature, including anthropomorphized natural forms and metaphysical figures. It explores desire, transformation, transcendence, ecology, and consciousness, and considers psychological experience and the healing potential of art.
A near-death experience in 2020 deepened my inquiry into states of consciousness, awareness of the energetic body, and our interconnectedness with nature and one another. Through meditative practices and a form of cross-modal perception often described as synesthesia, emotional, energetic, and sensory information is experienced as color, shape, and movement.
My work is shaped by my synesthetic, sensory, and clairvoyant experiences, presenting a dynamic view of reality. As a neurodivergent artist, I integrate multiple methods of perception into my work. The fragmentation and interconnectedness of forms, layered spaces, symbols, emotional use of color, and fluidity of space reflect my patterns of thought and attention and how I synthesize them. The canvas is a ground that can hold two perspectives simultaneously: the dualities between inner and outer experience, representation and revelation, flow and resistance, and abstraction and perception.
My imagery emerges through an intuitive dialogue with my materials. Both concept and composition emerge through material interactions as the paint slowly dries into stains and puddles, forming negative and positive spaces with organic edges. Working on the floor, I use water and gravity to direct the flow of paint across the canvas. Trusting the material intelligence of my process, I let paint spread, using flow dynamics to create fields of color, lines, and shapes.
I observe as the paint dries into spontaneous shapes, colors, marks, edges, and spatial relationships, allowing meaning, imagery, and composition to emerge through material interaction. Through layers of translucent washes, pigments, and brushwork, I respond to the imagery that develops, allowing the physical process of painting to reveal forms shaped by both material and psychic processes.
Interpreting these patterns becomes a form of visual scrying. Symbolic imagery surfaces through this process, drawing from subconscious memory and collective consciousness. Fragments reorganize into symbolic forms, creating psychological landscapes where memory, sensation, emotion, environment, symbolism, and consciousness converge.
The paintings use a dream-like visual language in which familiar forms shift, figures merge with environments, and multiple realities coexist. Color is both emotional and symbolic, creating spaces that invite viewers to engage with their own memories, associations, and perceptions. The paintings explore the psyche as a landscape where multiple states of awareness exist simultaneously.
I look deeply into nature to understand its sentience and energetic exchanges between people, plants, and environments. I often combine the figure with anthropomorphic natural forms to explore ecology and the sentience of nature.
I view the canvas as a portal, an unfolding space where connections between the visible and invisible aspects of human experience are explored. The work unfolds through the presence of the viewer, whose perception and embodied experience become part of the exchange. I am interested in how visual experience resonates physically, emotionally, and perceptually.
For me, painting is not a response but a transformative experience. It is an act of self-realization that traces my interior journey and explores the interconnections between body, mind, nature, and cosmos. My paintings visualize these phenomena through forms that arise, transform, and dissolve across the canvas surface.
I seek to reveal the unseen and mysterious dimensions of reality, making the invisible visible and revealing the energetic and spiritual dimensions of experience.