Grief & Gratitude

Guest Opinion

A bit of courage is helpful when an artist creates from an authentic place. The same can be said for the viewer when looking at a work of art—it can take some courage.

Making artwork that is honest can leave the artist feeling revealed and the viewer feeling seen. It is that invisible thread of vulnerability that artist Michelle Tock York nurtured so lovingly into all of her sculptures. There is very little distance between who Michelle was and what came out of her.

Even though she was shy by nature, Michelle’s sculptures were her voice. She crafted a language that had the power to bring someone to tears because of the truthful and relatable stories which they told, or she could also make someone laugh out loud for the same exact reason.

Mostly through clay and found object sculptures, Michelle put on full display her profound reverence to nature. Her work is always recognizable and in many ways an embodiment of who she was: kind, nurturing, a great listener and non-judgmental.

Her most recent pieces were heavily focused on cranes, herons, and her trademark figurative sculptures of women, which she adorned with hand sculpted flowers and bits of nature which she loved to collect from her walks in the woods. I have never seen an artist who had the ability to sculpt such beautiful hands, and it’s no wonder—they were always modeled after her own.

One of the things that made Michelle’s sculptures so unique was the way in which she combined highly skilled and refined clay sculpture with old relics and treasures that she collected (or lovingly hoarded). Old parts from a piano became legs for a dancing woman; a chunk off of an old rusty truck became a dress for Little Red Riding Hood; an antique ice skate blade became a fish fin.

It is this alchemy she created by combining old, discarded, and overlooked objects alongside the beauty of her clay work that revealed who she was. Things which others would have deemed as junk were perfectly imperfect to Michelle and only fed the spark of her constant imagination. She had the ability to see the beauty in everything, and that included people too.

By now you may have noticed that I am referencing Michelle in the past tense. Under no circumstances did I want this all-too short tribute to her to read like an obituary, instead more like a paean to her artist spirit.

The painful thing is that Michelle passed away on March 26, 2025. She was a mom, a wife, a sister, and a dear friend. She loved making art so much that she shared her knowledge as an art educator for 28 years teaching in the Bloomfield Hills School district. The impact which she had on her students is immeasurable.

When news of Michelle’s passing began to spread to her past art students, the calls and emails came in droves. They all needed to express how “Mrs. York” made them feel. Resounding descriptions of being accepted, safe, seen, and empowered were repeated by everyone. One student, Sutton Belyea, had a deep connection with Mrs. York and credits her with helping to “mold his entire life by nurturing the part of him which was meant to be creative.”

Sutton shared that he was a very unhappy and struggling teenager, but that Mrs. York’s classroom was a haven for him. It was her robust and atypical high school art curriculum which helped him have a leg up on getting into U of M and earning a masters in illustration. Sutton says that when he writes and illustrates his first book, he plans to dedicate it to Michelle as the most influential person in his life.

Michelle poured her emotions and how she saw the world into each piece of art that she made, which now live on for the world to discover. I have profound gratitude every time I look at one of her pieces at the gallery and see a little bit of her.

Words by Michelle Tock York: “Relics of My Life”

As a child I would lay under the great white pines in a bed of needles so soft they tickled the back of my legs. I’d run through the meadow, where the grasses were as tall as I was small.

I’d go just beyond the hole in the fence to the spaces & imagine I was free to be and do whatever I wished like a bird in flight.

Now, today, I worship not only the bigger landscape, but also the diminutive details…the bird song, colors, textures, woven nests & the creatures that abound.

Shanny Brooke is an artist and the owner of Higher Art Gallery located in Traverse City.

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