Bio
Michelle Burdine is an interdisciplinary artist and who relies on photographic vocabulary and processes to make her multi-media works. Burdine’s formal study of the humanities and photography built the foundation for her visual exploration of socially constructed systems. Her work attempts to understand and make visible the physical, psychogenic, and material interchanges between social institutions and personhood. Repetition, landscape, organic materials, and story-telling play recurring roles in her sociological investigations. Her current work explores time, loss, family, and her own menstruating body.
Michelle Burdine holds a Master of Fine Arts from The Ohio State University and a Master of Humanities from Wright State University. Burdine is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at Centre College in Danville, KY leading the Photography & Digital Media area.
Artist Statement
I have an insatiable drive to understand the cyclical relationship between human beings and the social constructs we build that, in turn, govern our behavior. My photograph practice often expands into mixed-media installations that include text in the form of narration or storytelling. The use of mixed-media in my work reflects the way I see the contemporary human condition as an attempt to thrive within a human-constructed network of social systems that often seem to be void of humanity. I employ storytelling with my visual art to process these sometimes-disparate materials. Through my photography-centered, mixed-media practice, I make visible the physical, psychogenic, and material interchanges between social institutions and personhood. Reflections on standardized time, a human invention, serves as a foundational component in my work because of its role in managing social institutions.
The roots of my current work can be found in an ongoing investigation of menstruation as an organic process that measures time. Menstruating bodies keep time that refers to, but is separate from, the institution of standardized time. Menstruation is a process that is interwoven into the institution of family. Menstruation indicates a body assumed capable of bearing children. It is a cycle for the preparation of sustaining life. It is a shedding of tissue when no life takes hold. My work with this interesting material shifted to a type of lifeline for me during the time that my parents were significantly, rapidly declining. Linear time became abstract, while bodily time connected me to the living world as I moved through the chaos of caretaking, my parents’ deaths, and into grief. Specifically, I began attempting to make circles with my menstrual blood using my finger as a paintbrush. The creation of a perfect circle is dependent upon a fixed point in the center. Without the center, a round shape can be achieved, but not a perfect circle. Circles are closed, offering both protection and space inside. Within a circle, there is a stillness which provides a place to rest. The imperfect round shapes I created with my blood are permeable. They leak. They drip. They are messy. As I negotiate a world of systems that feels increasingly chaotic, a nuclear family abruptly absent its beloved parents, and a body that may have passed its halfway point, I find myself exploring a life with no fixed center.
My work investigates the relationship between the social systems created by humans and the bodies those systems affect—a task I believe to be one of the most urgent at hand. Both the making and the use of the photographic image is a tool used by social systems. Its power lies in the way it is used to represent— a power that has been used nefariously by individuals and institutions when framing the “other.” While a photograph doesn’t have the power to stop time or save people literally, it is uniquely able to pull slices from the linear standardized timeline—effectively holding them still. This makes photography an ideal language through which to separate parts of pervasive systems into small sections, allowing the time needed for close study. I have two goals in mind when I use photography to make visible the human position within social systems. The first is study and question the systems humans have built. The second is to harness emotional intelligence as a tool for transitioning broken systems into inclusive systems of belonging that support all segments of society.