Michelle Duxbury

Michelle Duxbury
(she/her)

Michelle Duxbury, formerly working as alabamathirteen, is an artist from and based in Leeds, UK. Central to her practice is a focus on an intrinsic link between landscape, body and identity, through the lens of disability at an intersection with class, drawing on her own experience as a disabled, neurodivergent, working class woman.

Her work aims to interrogate the visibility of disabled bodies in society, making visible the social constructs and power dynamics that govern our bodies and identities. She is interested in access to the landscape and particularly who has the freedom to access the landscape; in individual and collective connection to landscape, and how this impacts on feelings of belonging/not belonging. 

Her practice is driven by process based research and experimentation working predominantly with embroidery, video, film and sound, and creating immersive installation work that combines multiple sensory experiences embedded with accessibility, which also allows her to interrogate the in/accessibility created by traditional hierarchies in visual art.

Duxbury had a solo exhibition at The Art House in Wakefield in 2022, following a residency there in 2021. She was awarded a PANIC! Bursary from The Tetley in 2021, and selected for the Yorkshire Sculpture International Sculpture Network in 2022. She was also one of 90 artists selected to exhibit in the Leeds Artists Show at Leeds Art Gallery, running from February to April 2023. She is on the Board of Trustees at The Tetley, a contemporary art gallery in their hometown of Leeds, and Shape Arts, a disability-led organisation which works to improve access to culture for disabled people and supports disabled artists to develop their careers. She is also a founding member of DISrupt.

Website: michelleduxbury.studio
Instagram: @alabamathirteen
Soundcloud: alabamathirteen

Image descriptions:

Ghosts In The Machine
A round woven basket, approximately 20 cm in diameter. To the left, a wooden bobbin, standing on its end so it’s 26 cm high. A length of black cloth spools from it in folds, filling the basket. A pattern taken from a spectogram, a visual representation of sound, has been sewn in tiny, neat cross-stitching across the bobbin-end of the cloth. The bright colours of the cross stitches, magenta, orange, pink and yellow, give the impression of myriad points of light. These form horizontal bars of different lengths, which break up into irregular patterns at one end. There is no obvious source of the low-volume sound in the sculpture.

The Outpouring I & II
The image is an installation shot of the work being exhibited at the Leeds Artists Show, Leeds Art Gallery. Each piece is a visual representation of sound in cross stitch mounted in a pale wood box frame. To the left is The Outpouring I, the central areas are mainly shades of red, peach and pink. At the top there is a scattering of blue and purple. To the right is The Outpouring II, the central areas are mainly shades blue. At the bottom there is a scattering of pink and purple.

The Precipice
Documentation of a two part sculptural work. To the left of the image is a photo of a white wax hand, sitting on top of a large sandy coloured rock. The fingers appear to be grasping at a crevice in the rock. The top of the wax hand is missing creating a indentation that has been filled with small sprigs of heather. To the right of the image is a photograph of a white studio wall, four small bunches of heather are hung by their stalks. The bunches get smaller and shorter from left to right, creating a diagonal appearance. To the right of the smallest/shortest bunch there is a small piece of cross stitch, an abstracted view of a sandy coloured rock formation with a covering of green moss.

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