Michelle Samour
Milk and Honey: Stuck

Media:  Abaca, mother pearl acrylic, gouache

Artist Statement:
Milk and Honey: Stuck uses the actual cartography of the Middle East, beginning with my own history as one of the Palestinian Diaspora, to talk about how the redefinition of borders by colonialists over a hundred years ago has created disruption in that region of the world. The work uses the methods of fracturing, mirroring and re-configuring and the traditions of indigenous design that I grew up with (including mother of pearl/abalone handiwork), to celebrate the cultural history of this region while at the same time subversively critiquing it. 

Mother of Pearl (acrylic) is cut into the shapes of Israel, Palestine, the West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem and the settlements, as are the resulting shapes occurring from the cartography’s mirroring.  These fragments are embedded into sheets of overbeaten Abaca pigmented the colors of honey; once dried the paper is painted with values of white gouache. ‘Stuck’ in honey, these land masses are transformed into biological specimens creating a tension between stasis and potentiality, the search for the promised land; the land of ‘milk and honey’. Habitat Fragmentation (the effects of geographic fragmentation on biologic diversity), flagella (the means of movement for microscopic organisms), plant metamorphosis, root structures and cell division are the visual vocabulary suggested in this re-examination of land as a malleable, movable biologic and political construct.

Biography

Michelle Samour has been teaching papermaking and working with handmade paper and pulp in her own practice for 40 years. She is Professor of the Practice at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA) at Tufts University, where she teaches innovative approaches to working with handmade paper. 

She has received Artist Fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a Society of Arts and Crafts New England Artist Award and grants from the Cushman Family Fund and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to study historic papermaking in France and Japan. She exhibits her work nationally and internationally.