The Stratigraphic Archives

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Michele Burgess, a distinguished artist and longtime steward of the fine press tradition, passed away peacefully in her sleep on November 2, 2024. She was 63. Burgess worked in printmaking, painting, sculpture, and book art. She received an MFA in printmaking from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Burgess’s artists’ books are in public collections across the country and have been exhibited at the Museé d'Art Americain in Giverny, France, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Fresno Art Museum, and Oceanside Museum of Art. She taught for more than 30 years in the art departments at Palomar College, San Diego State University and the University of San Diego. Her personal artwork can be seen at www.micheleburgessart.com.

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Michele Burgess’s series, “The Stratigraphic Archives” is an exploration of the processes, forms, and markings that reflect the patterns, gestures, and atmospheres of both quiet and cataclysmic events—natural and human made. She was interested in the relationship of these events to the human condition and the conditions of nature at its most fragile. Since 2005, she has been creating artist’s books that explore palimpsest, time and gesture, erasure and “repair.” Working in collaboration with other artists and poets, she seeks to combine human history and natural history, bringing these themes together in an essential way, working with ideas inspired by places such as churches and reliquaries, geological sites, art museums, personal memory, natural history museums, riverbeds and ocean floors, and library rare book rooms.