Michael Morin is an American artist, writer, and builder whose work is rooted in the relationship between creation and destruction.
Michael Morin is the brother of Rachel Morin. His ongoing body of work, F.L.E.S.H., is dedicated in part to Rachel and distinguishes between the violence inflicted upon a person and the life that existed before it, refusing to allow the ending of someone’s life to redefine everything that came before.
Largely self-taught, Morin works across painting, mixed media, writing, and physical construction. His visual work is built through accumulation: acrylic paint, pastel, ink, spray paint, paper, scratches, marks, and fragments are layered, obscured, damaged, and rebuilt. Rather than concealing that process, he allows its history to remain visible.
Morin’s approach to art is inseparable from his life as a builder. Years spent working with his hands have shaped the way he understands material, structure, imperfection, and repair. A surface can be constructed, broken apart, covered, exposed, and constructed again. The evidence of what came before does not necessarily diminish the finished work; it can become the thing that gives it meaning.
That idea extends beyond material. His work frequently returns to memory, identity, belief, loss, beauty, and the ways experience accumulates within a person over time. He is particularly interested in the tension between control and accident: the point at which something stops becoming what was intended and begins becoming something else.
Across disciplines, Morin does not pursue perfection so much as transformation. He is interested in what survives revision, what remains after damage, and the unexpected beauty that can emerge when neither is erased.