Collector Preview
Carved paper that lives like sculpture.
Layers cut by hand.
Texture that carries memory.
A preview of work from Cracks in the Temple, Crucible and Ashes.
Available Works
Ashes (2022-ongoing)
Fire #3 (2022)
Carved paper and mixed media on wood panel
6 x 6 inches
The surface glows with a clean kind of heat. Bright cuts of yellow and green spark against the softer whites and pastel traces underneath. The marks feel fast and instinctive, yet the piece has a steady center. It’s a study in ignition, the moment before a feeling becomes a force. The work carries a sense of lift, as if something inside it is just beginning to rise.
Curves #1 (2022)
Carved paper and mixed media on wood panel
12 x 12 inches
Color and movement lock together in a swirl that feels alive. The carved lines break into loops and eddies, revealing slips of bright color inside each turn. There is heat in the rhythm. The surface feels soft in some areas and sharp in others, like the inside of a body lit from within. The piece carries a pulse, a reminder that growth rarely follows a straight line.
No Place (2022)
Carved paper and mixed media on wood panel
14 x 11 inches
This piece moves like shifting ground. Carved rings rise and fall across the surface with a rhythm that feels both deliberate and restless. The cut lines open into small pools of color that peek through the pale field beneath. Up close, the layers hold a quiet sense of excavation. It reads like a landscape that refuses stillness, a place where memory never fully settles.
Strange Love: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Bod (2022)
Carved paper and mixed media on wood panel
16 x 12 inches
This work carries a rough beauty in every inch. The surface is dense, scraped, and layered, with flashes of skin tones and unexpected color breaking through the noise. It feels like a wall that has lived through stories, torn down and rebuilt again and again. There is humor in the title, but the piece itself holds a softer truth. It honors the strange, imperfect relationship we have with our own bodies, and the quiet pride that grows when we stop fighting ourselves.
Cracks in the Temple (2023-ongoing)
Emberloo (2023)
Carved paper and mixed media on wood panel
40 x 30 inches
Emberloo sits between presence and disappearance. The figure rises through a field of bright blue, then breaks apart into tectonic shifts of color. The piece carries a sense of memory surfacing through water or heat. The reds at the base feel like a pulse. The scraped blues and greens move like currents. It is a study in simultaneous emergence and erosion.
Lorette-ah (2023)
Carved paper and mixed media on wood panel
40 x 30 inches
Lorette-ah holds a strong form through a storm of color. The central red shape anchors the composition while the surrounding lines twist and scatter. It feels like a body held inside a moment of high voltage. The blacks, whites, and bright fragments around the edges read like signals breaking apart and reforming. The piece carries the power of force and focus.
Dyspena Novena (2023)
Carved paper and mixed media on wood panel
40 x 30 inches
This piece turns the circle into a field of shifting zones. The deep blue center meets a bright arc of yellow and red, then dissolves into soft pink-lavender. Each layer feels like a different temperature. The carved lines expose older histories underneath, almost geological in the way they reveal time through color. The whole piece moves between softness and molten intensity.
Noirka (2023)
Carved paper and mixed media on wood panel
40 x 30 inches
Noirka is a portrait rebuilt by pressure. The tangled lines move like nerves firing across a body, fast and intentional. Beneath them, the brilliant purple ground holds steady while flashes of yellow, teal, and red break through. The surface carries tension and clarity at once. It reads like a mind in motion, sorting signal from noise.
Spring Chaos (2023)
Carved paper and mixed media on wood panel
11 x 14 inches
A clean split runs through the center, and everything moves around that opening. One side is cool and pale, the other warmed by deep reds and saturated burgundies. The carved layers rise and fall like something geological, exposed and shifting. This piece feels like a season changing in real time. It holds instability without collapsing. What breaks open here is not falling apart. It is becoming something new.
Fall Order (2023)
Carved paper and mixed media on wood panel
11 x 14 inches
The surface holds a steady rhythm. Horizontal bands sit beneath a darker vertical spine that organizes the whole composition. Color breaks through in controlled flashes of powerful jewel tones like purple, green, and red. The layers show their history without losing their structure. The piece feels engineered at first glance, but the carved paper keeps it alive and tactile. Order rises out of pressure, and you can feel the weight that shaped it.
About the artist
Michele Bonds creates carved-paper works built from stacked layers of washi, magazines, and hand-dyed sheets. Each piece is shaped, cut, and re-cut until the surface holds its own gravity. Her practice lives between carving, architecture, and the felt intelligence of the body.
Her work studies the meeting point of the physical, the spiritual, and the earthly. The pieces draw on physics, material science, and somatic experience, using pressure, rupture, and restoration as ways to map human transformation.
Working out of the 14C residency in Jersey City, Michele builds layered terrains that feel both intimate and structural.
How to collect a piece
If a piece calls to you, send a note and I will take it from there. Email me at michele@michelebonds.com with the title of the work and your city. I respond personally within two business days.
Private viewings are available in Jersey City and New York by request.