Michele Van Slyke is known for designing and fabricating one-of-a-kind steel and aluminum sculptures in a wealth of public and private settings.
Born and raised in France, she attended the Universities of Sorbonne and Heidelberg before coming to the U.S. in the mid-sixties. She and her husband settled on Bainbridge Island a decade later. Being a creative artist, she experimented with materials ranging from fabric to enamel, finally settling on metal as her medium of choice.
In addition to solo gallery shows of sculpture, her work has included private commissions of practical and decorative pieces. She has worked with educators, architects, and builders on many building projects. The forms of her creativity — gates, railings, doorways — can be found at Bainbridge Island City Hall, the Bainbridge Public Library, and IslandWood; in homes on Bainbridge; and in Seattle at Children’s, Swedish and Virginia Mason Hospitals. For her hospital installation in a children’s bone-marrow transplant waiting room, she translated metal and enamel into air, sunshine and wetland grasses to give the patients and their families the hope for a sunnier world.
An advocate of the importance of integrating art in public places, she will tell you “If we work with artists, the work can be done beautifully, and it will be there for us forever.”