When you think of the nude form depicted in art, you likely imagine a Renaissance oil painting or marble sculpture.
However, Dayton-based fabric artist Mychaelyn Michalec uses textiles, knit, and embroidery to explore the naked body and themes of gendered labor and stereotypes, feminism, aging, sexuality, and art history.
“Textiles are historically a language of creation and storytelling assigned to women at birth,” she notes when discussing her choice of medium.
Trying to get all my birds to land in the yard
Michalec rug art requires several levels of labor, starting with drawing the form she intends to capture then hand and machine sewing it into fruition.
[Be sure to check out her Instagram reels for a taste of her artistic process. It’s hypnotic.]
We first became acquainted with Michalec’s work through the “Ohio Women to Watch Exhibition” sponsored by the Bader + Simon Gallery in Cincinnati, part of the larger National Museum for Women in the Arts (NMWA) Museum exhibit. The Ohio Advisory Group, a subsidiary of NMWA was responsible for the Ohio show.
Her work and the work of other impactful female artists is currently on display in Portsmouth’s South Ohio Museum.
But enough from me. Let’s hear from the artist in her own words:
A lot of my work has been about the failures of second-wave feminism for my generation. Not always in the broadest sense, but in the domestic realm and my own personal achievements as an artist and woman.
My studio practice took a 13-year hiatus while I stayed at home to raise my children.
Although I went to school to be an artist and had a position at a well funded contemporary art center I soon realized after I made the choice to have a child that the cost of daycare exceeded my salary.
I sort of felt forced into making a choice that was seemingly not a choice at all, which was to stay home with my child. At the time, I didn’t have a sense of community with other artists who were going through the same thing, and I didn’t hear a lot about parents who were also artists. I started making work again in 2015, and at that point, the work became about the thing that I felt had most impeded me from making work in the first place, which was being a parent and a caretaker.
At first, my work was a lot about gendered labor and the emotional labor of parenthood and family life.
But as my children have aged and as my relationship changed with my partner, and then going from married to single, the examination of the roles and expectations of myself as a woman, a mother, a wife, and an artist have all been part of the exploration of my work.
Not only that but looking at the role of women in art through art history as both artist and subject.
I have a master's degree in librarian and information science, which I feel is an essential tool to my work. I often find that my work comes from falling down a research well.
Finding a subject or an idea that I’m interested in and chasing it all the way down. I love that a lot of museums’ collections are online now, and it’s also a tool in my work.
I studied painting and drawing in art school, but as the work became about the domestic realm, I wanted to bring the work full circle into domesticity in both subject matter and technique. I started looking for a way to incorporate domestic craft into my work, and that is when I saw a commercial rug tufting machine back in 2018 and thought this could possibly be a tool I could draw with. I have incorporated both Hand tufting and using a commercial rug tufting machine in my work.
I also use a lot of knitting. Knitting is significant to me because it was one of the few creative outlets I actually had during my studio hiatus. It was portable. Something I can do on the go with two small children sewing in embroidery is also important to my practice. I learned both at a young age from both my mother and my great grandmother.
I feel like it is a skill that is passed down maternally.
