About

Career

After graduating with honors in Visual Studies (Art) from Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH, Michèle moved to Martha’s Vineyard, MA, where she converted a former fish market into a living space and printmaking studio. She taught workshops in etching and screen printing there for the next decade.

She went on to start a textile art business based on a proprietary process she invented. From this she built a successful fashion accessories company that was in operation for 8 years. Her hand-printed accessories were represented by Apropos Studio NY, and sold at Neiman Marcus, Portantina, Barneys NY and Barneys Japan, Takashimaya NY and Japan, Felissimo NY, and many other high-end boutiques.

After this entrepreneurial period Michèle returned to non-commercial artmaking. She began using precious metals in her work and developed a printing method for making washable gold imagery on textiles with co-inventor/artist, Joan Morris. They obtained a US patent for their invention in 2003, and worked together on a series of large-scale artworks. Their collaborative works were widely exhibited and several were acquired by the Wadsworth Atheneum Art Museum and the RISD Art Museum for their permanent collections. (link to images of the collaborative Animation series)

In 2008, Michèle relocated to Saxtons River, Vermont. She converted another old building into an art studio, (this time, a chicken barn). She continued making art and teaching private lessons in printmaking until 2020, when she moved to Belfast, Maine.

Michèle Ratté currently lives and works in Belfast, Maine, USA.

Early Influences

Michèle traces her artmaking aspirations back to childhood in the American Southwest where she spent weekends and vacations hiking and rock-collecting in the deserts and mountains with her geologist father. Traveling those landscapes, encountering vast rock formations, canyons, cliff-dwellings, petroglyphs, and native cultures, formed lasting impressions that have influenced her work throughout her career.

Her interest in sewing and weaving originated from a fascination with the rugs and baskets made by the Huna Tlinget indigenous peoples of Chichagof Island, Alaska- gifts given to her mother’s family when they ran a salmon cannery in Hoonah.

She is grounded in our need and love of the natural world as well as the beauty of our influence on it.

Coastal Effect

Michèle finds heightened creative vitality in ocean habitats--meandering along shorelines, foraging and collecting, observing geological and botanical processes. Contributing to her art making practice have been working retreats in shoreside locations including the Provincelands of Cape Cod, the Chazy Fossil Reef Preserve (a 450 million year old seabed) on Isle La Motte in northern Vermont, the Nicoya and Osa Peninsulas of Costa Rica, and County Mayo, Ireland.

Work Traits

Michèle integrates drawing and printmaking with found objects, as well as, sewing, knitting and weaving with non-traditional materials. Drawing is, and always has been the framework for all her work. Experimentation is also fundamental. She routinely incorporates precious metals printed on textiles, along with discarded objects such as wasp nest paper, beach rope threads, tangled stainless steel fishing line, used cloth, etc. The work dictates the materials she uses.

“I would like to acknowledge that I live and work in Okuwaponahkik, “the land of the dawn”, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Wabanaki Nations.”