1974 Born in Belgium
1997 MA Fine Art, Department of Visual Arts, LUCA School of Arts, Ghent, Belgium
2013 Printmaking Academy Anderlecht (Brussels), Belgium
Michèle Vanvlasselaer is a Belgian artist who has developed a special connection with glass and light. She explores the sensory experience of space and time and attempts to materialize the ephemeral natural light in space by working with the imperfections and reflections of mouth-blown glass. Just as a falling raindrop against the window highlights a flow of time she tries to connect time and space. In addition, she explores how the stained glass window today can bring local topographical contexts into the viewer’s consciousness, creating a perceptibility that frees the viewer from any perceptual routine and opens up a world that had been hidden until then. Is what we see and how we see possibly culturally determined, and can the stained glass window have an impact on how we see?
Over the last 20 years she has lived and worked in a diversity of cultural environments, drawing on local reality, history, light conditions, colours and recycled materials as a challenge and inspiration for her work.
In Phnom Penh, she created the series of large installations “In Search of Lost Time”, fascinated by the transparency and texture of Cambodia's ubiquitous plastic bags and rice sacks. In Kinshasa, she completed her largest work to date, "Meeting Under the Ficus Tree", a 100m2 glass wall for the cultural centre and art gallery Bilembo, composed from over a thousand glass pieces recovered from an abandoned colonial cotton factory.
Having pursued her passion for glass through working in Egypt and the surrounding region - which culminated in her sculpture "The Ice Queen, Lost in the Desert" - she has worked in Gaza on a range of initiatives. This included a 6 months artist residency and a commission to design 52 stained glass windows for a new mosque at the Gaza harbour, and drawings for the installation “Glass-forest for Gaza”. Other important works are “Bariolé” a glass installation for architect Hilde Daem (Robbrecht en Daem architecten), “Between the Lines” for the King and Queen of Belgium, the stained glass window “Heterotopia” for the wedding hall of the city of Marche-en-Famenne.
Currently Michèle Vanvlasselaer is working in Amsterdam on a “discursive landscape”, a glass installation in a building by architect Berlage. Here collaboration with the Zurich based American composer and visual artist Rama Gottfried is an on-going process. The installation explores the sensory experience of space.