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 work combines multiple ways of seeing, sensing, and understanding reality to explore the nature of consciousness and the energetic connections between the natural environment and each other.
Painting is my way of understanding the world, where intuition, sensation, observation, memory, and emotion merge within a liminal space; the canvas being the threshold between the seen and unseen.
I am curious about the universal aspects of human experience and emotional responses. I am influenced by scientific theories about the nature of reality, Buddhist contemplative practices, and esoteric spiritual traditions.
My paintings visualize these phenomena through forms that arise, transform, and dissolve across the canvas surface.
My work is shaped by my synesthetic, sensory, and clairvoyant experiences, offering 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 all 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. Observing and interpreting the imagery that emerges through this process, I respond by emphasizing or suppressing the forms that arrive using brushwork, then apply additional layers of translucent washes and pigments. I use (single space) a method of visual scrying to interpret its meaning and identify emergent imagery, informed by conscious thought, memory, and the formal relationships occurring through this process.
My work records my observations of the subtle flow of energy and auric emanations that I observe around people and within nature. My visual language uses natural patterns of movement, growth, accumulation, and structures. I also 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.
My intention in the work is not to reproduce the visible world, but to make the invisible visible, revealing the energetic and spiritual dimensions of experience. I seek to reveal the unseen and mysterious dimensions of reality that extend beyond its representation.