Michelle Lotz is an artist and materials engineer, completing her final year of a double major in Fine Art and Ceramic Engineering at Alfred University.
Michelle’s artistic body of work focuses on the manifestation of a luminescent fantastical world, comprising blown glass forms, painting with luminescent pigments, lost-wax aluminum and bronze casting, and fiber arts. Visit “Current Work” and “Projects” to see the scope of her past and present projects.
Michelle’s largest work to date is an intricate tree, adorned with curious faeirie folk, cast from 300 lbs of aluminum and painted with luminescent pigments, creating a realistic yet fantastical focal point for her current body of work.
In the more scientific realm of engineering, Michelle has just completed her Senior Thesis at Alfred University, in which she was able to create zinc-based luminescence in SLS glass.
Michelle’s current project, “The Mysterious Disappearance of Dr. Henry P. Dinkleman,” is an immersive installation depicting the office and collection of Dr. Dinkleman; an eccentric naturalist from the 19th century who found a portal to Avalon, the mythical realm of the Fairies. The viewer will find Dinkleman’s Dublin office vacant and in shambles, sacked by the previous occupants of bell jars and cages. The portal that Dr. Dinkleman was laughed out of the scientific community for claiming to have found will be a large “painting” that is in fact be a 5’ tall diorama depicting the fantastical bioluminescent forest of Avalon. This mythical realm is inspired by the flora and fauna of Ireland, the Black Forest, and other exotic environments around the globe and underwater. The characters present will be inspired by Irish oral history predating the Roman period.
Dr, Dinkleman’s attitudes toward the supernatural are an allegory for human’s tendency to meddle in technology they do not understand. His office will be filled with examples of his attempts to harness the power of this world for his own devices, or capture the free creatures of the complex ecosystem for his own fame and reputation.
This work also speaks to the trampling of nature and other cultures that was especially prevalent in the 18th century, but has existed since pre-Roman times. Much of ancient Irish oral history is the chronicling of invasions of the island and the different cultures that forced each other out. The most well documented of these is the invasion of the Saxons in the post-Roman period, however the oral history includes several invasions before this and claims that the original inhabitants, the Tuatha Dé Danann (Children of Danu), were forced underground into the mounds and ancient megalithic monuments still visible across Ireland and the UK today.