Michele Heather Pollock

Columbus, Indiana

“Now I am a nature artist, yes, but I think I am also an environmental artist as well. Everything works together to point out the normally unseen things living their lives around us, to make people look more closely at the natural world, all in an attempt to stir in viewers the same sense of wonder I get when I stumble upon a new mushroom, or find a gloriously green patch of moss after a rain. I believe we will save nature if we love it.”

Since moving to the woods in 2008, Michele Heather Pollock has become increasingly fascinated by the forest ecosystem. For several years, she took long walks in the woods almost daily, in all seasons and weather. She then used what she observed as inspiration for her studio work. In 2018, she developed a rare autoimmune disease called Scleroderma. Because Scleroderma has made it difficult for her to continue walking in the woods, she creates physical souvenirs of her old life in the woods while the memories are still fresh.

Pollock–a self-taught amateur naturalist–makes art as way to explore, discover, observe, and remember the natural world around her. Spending time in the woods became an essential part of her process: walking in the woods, watching things emerge, grow, go to seed, and die back, photographing tiny treasures, and journaling. With her art, she shows us the often-unseen things that live their lives parallel to ours. For example, in Forest Floor, she re-creates mosses, lichen, leaves, and mushrooms, providing us with a glimpse into the biodiversity of the forest.

Columbus, Indiana

Forest Re-framed #1: Turkey

Tail Mushroom, 2021

Machine quilted paper, hand sewn assembly

Forest Re-framed #1: Turkey

Tail Mushroom is an assemblage of hundreds of machine quilted paper turkey tail mushrooms. The pieces are hand-sewn together to re-create the way turkey tail mushrooms grow together on logs in nature.

Courtesy of the artist

Columbus, Indiana

To Know This Place, 2022

Machine stitched paper/ fabric, acrylics, hand embroidery

Courtesy of the artist

To Know This Place dives deeply into a sense of the place where I live and work, the woods I love and miss, my new relationship to it, my sense of loss, and the experience of relearning and rediscovery.

The titular piece in the body of work, To Know This Place, is a large accordion-fold book featuring paper/fabric images of various spots along my most frequent woods walk, highlighting specific flora and fauna that I have seen there. Each image is made of machine quilted mono-printed papers, and fabric stained with mud from my woods, plus machine stitched “drawings,” acrylic and watercolor paints, and hand embroidery. I mount each image on a single accordion-fold page that features field notes from my journals typed on an antique typewriter. The piece is part quilt, part artist book, part nature journal, and part field guide.

Columbus, Indiana Forest Floor, 2022

Machine stitched paper/ eco-dyed fabric, hand embroidery

Courtesy of the artist

Forest Floor is an eco-dyed upcycled linen tablecloth which has been machine quilted.

Various forest floor elements are contained within, including hand embroidered mosses, beaded lichen, quilted paper leaves, and paper and fabric sculpture mushrooms.