Welcome to this space
You might be surprised to hear what has kept me going through a shit tone of a lot these past few years, heck most of my life has felt like a lot, maybe you can relate! Anyway, back to what has kept me going is music, finding ways to laugh and the biggest thing: my insatiable curiosity!
Curiosity, I have learned, is its own kind of self-soothing. Not the forced positivity of trying to feel better, but the genuine wondering of a child turning over a stone, oh how I love those memories of being a child with not much else to do then spend hours happily flipping over rocks to see what lies beneath.
I am someone who always has a quiet wondering in my heart. About what the light is doing this morning. About what is growing through that crack over there in the wall of my favourite record shop. I am always in deep thought about what I am feeling and why, and whether the bent stem in front of me might somehow say it better than I can.
This is my space to share my love for minimalist fine art photography, images made slowly, with attention, as a mindfulness practice and an exploration of our inner landscapes. But before we get to the work, I want to tell you why it exists.
When I think about my path, my so called resilience that I am often celebrated for, the one thread that has always pulled me back into the world, even when the world felt very far away has always been my curiosity.
I am the person that could sit and people watch all day, then move to another spot and spend more time watching the world go by. I have never really been a day dreamer, but more so love to get lost in the world in front of me, maybe that is daydreaming?
This new website is born from that curiosity. An exploration of the full range of what it means to be human. The joy and the grief, the wonder and the weight, the beautiful melancholy and the glimmers of hope. And of how the natural world and our surroundings reflects all of it back to us.
What began as a personal practice due to unforeseen constraints brought on by life (seriously isn’t that always the way these things are born!), and a need to find ways to get creative for my own sanity, started to show me that there is something deeper in this work I was creating.
After ten years of photographing others, I turned the lens toward the world around me, which feels full circle to be honest as that is why I picked up a camera in the first place, to process the grief of losing my mother.
The work I am sharing on this site is not about perfect flowers or grand landscapes. It is about the overlooked, the ordinary, the intimate and the true. About being curious not only about the world around us but about what that world stirs within us. About noticing what we are carrying, and finding in natural things a language for it.
This work began as my own way inward. It is offered here as an invitation, to wonder, to feel, to find your stillness even in the full complexity of being alive. This work has offered me space to pause, to indulge in my love of simplicity when life is anything but, and to offer moments of creative connection.
Creativity is not something anyone can just turn on, and for me anyway it’s not something I can plan out, heck I can barely olan what’s for dinner! Which is why I am excited to share this work, because it truly has come from my heart in moments least expected.
The Themes
botanicals
This is where this practice began from flowers I was attempting to grow in my garden. Flowers, stems, petals, the tender and the impermanent. Not images of perfect blooms, but meditations on impermanence. On the beauty of things that bend and fade and open anyway. Each image made slowly, with attention, as a way of moving through the interior world. A curiosity about what beauty looks like when we stop asking it to be flawless.
coastal
I spent my childhood on the beaches of Vancouver Island, hands deep in the pebbles, flipping stones to see what lived beneath, searching for starfish and sand dollars as though the world was an endless source of hidden treasure.
It was.
The coastal collection carries that same sense of wonderment. Stone, water, light, the patience of things worn smooth by time. These images are not just about the edge of the sea, they are about what it feels like to approach the world with open hands and genuine curiosity. To not know what you will find, and to find that enough.
embodiment
This collection explores the human form as landscape, the body as a site of memory, feeling, and lived experience. A natural extension of everything this practice is about, the curiosity about what we carry within us, and what it looks like when we let it be seen.
foraged
These images begin with a walk, in no particular place, open to whatever the day offers. Dried grasses, seed heads, the overlooked and the almost-passed, whatever caught my eye as I paused along the path, often with my dog by my side.
This collection is about curious discovery and finding treasure in the ordinary. Connecting to the natural world as a practice of noticing, of asking what is here today that I have never truly seen before.
noticed
The city is full of overlooked beauty. Shadows on walls, plants pushing through concrete, the quiet poetry of oxidized surfaces and forgotten textures. This collection asks the same question as all the others, what do you see when you slow down and observe what is in front of you; these images finds its answers in urban landscapes. A reminder that curiosity has no single habitat. Wonder lives everywhere, when we pause to allow ourselves to notice.
wonder with me
Each of these collections is an act of noticing. Each image a small reflection of the tender complexity of our shared humanity. The full range of it, not just the beautiful parts.
On the hard days, curiosity kept me here. Kept me looking. Kept me wondering what was under the next rock, what the light might look like in new spaces, what I might find if I just kept going.
This work is offered in that same spirit, as a place to return to when words fall short, when the noise gets loud, when you need somewhere quiet to land and something real to look at. Art for your walls, your quiet moments, your soul.
May you find something here that invites in a long and nourishing inhale, and slow exhale.
~michele xo