Photos courtesy Amanda LaBelle
In 2021, Michele Kirchner declared herself an artist.
During the turmoil of the pandemic, when Kirchner says the world as she understood it stopped and her faith in institutions she used to believe in was shaken, she came across a quote by environmental educator David W. Orr that resonated with the times.
“The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people,” Orr said. “But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage, willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little do with success as we have defined it.”
The quote, in fact, led Kirchner to wonder how to embody that philosophy as a practice while freeing herself from models of mainstream success. “Eventually the only job description that I could come up with that was generous enough to encompass all of the things was ‘artist’. It was kind of an active decision to give myself permission to explore that path, and to put all of the things together that I notice and care about, and see what comes from it,” she said.
Kirchner moved to North Haven, one of Maine’s unbridged Midcoast islands, in 2017. Sewing, knitting, basketry, felting, and other crafts were part of her life from a young age. As she developed her identity as an artist, Kirchner found a synergy between the skills she had at her fingertips and the materials the island afforded her, namely, debris.
“I was trying to fall back in love with the world around me,” she said. “When I spend time out in the world around me, I enjoy noticing and experiencing it with all of my senses, and I often come across material that feels like it’s out of place in the space where I am. The presence of debris is too widespread, but it is part of the current landscape and we need to find new ways to interact with it.” For Kirchner, creating artwork that incorporates those items is a powerful way to educate the viewer.
Tumbleweeds of window screen, found on the side of the road on the way to the town dump, became fluidly twisted lengths of kelp. Chunks of Styrofoam, enrobed in felt, became “plastiglomerates:” Kirchner’s take on a real phenomenon of the Anthropocene era, rocks which are partially composed of fused plastics.
“There’s a story that they’re telling us about appropriate disposal of plastics that isn’t entirely accurate or grounded in reality,” Kirchner said. “Particles so small are moving in the air, they’re moving invisibly, they’re moving in water, they’re moving through the soil matrix, wherever they’re put down, whether they’re on the beach, in my artwork, put into a landfill. This isn’t somehow magically going to stop happening—it’s another way we’re changing the chemistry of the world around us.”
Relationships and linkages—between humans and the natural world, between rocks and tree roots, between seaweed and driftwood at the high tide line, formed the cornerstone of Kirchner’s first solo exhibition, “Holdfast,” that was held at the North Haven Gallery in 2023.
“I was reminded about the term ‘holdfast’ being the non-nutritive base [of seaweed], where its only job is just to hold that organism in its place on the substrate that it attaches to, and I felt a lot of kinship with that concept in that moment in my life,” Kirchner said. “It spoke to me in a lot of different ways and the whole project really gave me a way to explore all of the ideas, the very literal interpretations and the more ephemeral associations also.”
After the success of her first show, Kirchner found herself facing another self-imposed artistic boundary.
“I’d get really involved in contrasting textures and just really different ways that I lose myself,” she said to explain how she experienced certain aspects of being in a beautiful place. “Going to the beach and hearing the water come up over the stones and hearing the stones roll away as the water recedes—it’s such an engaging sound but I couldn’t quite figure out how to document it or how to share it.”
A class she took with artist Debbie Lyddon, through an Australian organization, Fibre Arts Take Two, helped her dismantle the barriers between her visual and auditory observations. This artistic evolution was reflected in her second solo exhibition, “Bathymetry,” which was presented through the North Haven Gallery in July 2025.
In it, Kirchner engaged in detailed observations of places accessible from her home on the island: the movement of the tide at Jackson Cove, the eaves of her house in winter, the night sky—using place as a constant and time as a variable. The resulting collection of mixed-media work layers moment upon moment, creating remarkably precise abstractions rendered in paint, fiber, and fabric. The ambient soundscape, the flight path of birds through the scene, and the passage of time are documented through stitching, overlays, and cutouts.
One standout piece, “Deliquescence,” takes a more linear approach to the notation of sound, specifically, Kirchner’s transcription of the drip of melting snow. The visual pattern created by her transcription was then translated into a series of holes in a gauzy felt overlay, revealing an ephemeral-feeling background. The title of the piece reflects the erosion of the snow underneath the drip, as well as the gradual decay of the accuracy of Kirchner’s transcription.
Kirchner’s next steps in her artistic evolution aren’t yet determined, although she is currently deriving inspiration from the Löwenmensch, a 40,000-year-old mammoth ivory carving that is believed to be the earliest example of human artistic expression. Like her ancient predecessors, the desire to translate the radical act of devoting attention and time to her surroundings is her primary motivation to create.
“That’s sort of been the direction of my human growth, to try to notice more of the complexity of what’s going on around us, and that takes time and attention. Then to record it or reinterpret it also takes time and attention and a lot of different materials to be able to do it,” she said.
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Courtney Naliboff is a writer, educator, and musician on North Haven island. Her first book, Your Postpartum Body: The Complete Guide to Healing After Pregnancy, was released in June 2024.
For More Information
Michele Kirchner’s work can be seen on her Instagram page, @michelekirchnerart. Her work has been included in group shows at Archipelago, Lights Out Gallery, and 82 Parris, and she has shown pieces at New Era Gallery on Vinalhaven.
