Michelle Copini

Michelle Copini is a Dutch photographer based in Hong Kong. Through her background in the arts, art history and monument conservation and her early career as a restorator of wooden art and marquetry, Michelle learned to appreciate the rich narrative that can be found in the details: the patina, the cracks and veins that others overlook.

Photography, being her lifelong passion, proved a useful tool to document not only restoration processes but also the unique but disappearing urban environments she encountered during her global travels.

Since 2014 Michelle combines her creative mind with her photographic eye to give the observer of her work a glimpse of the stories she sees in micro images of patina and rich textures found in the unlikeliest of places. Layers of peeling paint in the back alleys of Hong Kong or in the fissured ridges of a clay wall in the desert of Algeria, anything can capture her imagination.

After adding a touch of ink or paint, Michelle’s augmented photographs pull the viewer into this second dimension, juxtaposing the fleeting with the eternal and uncovering poetic hidden worlds.