Mixed Media by Mellony Taper
Open Edition // Available to Order Individually with Personalised Message
Here We Are Again, 2021 1-12
Mellony Taper
I am an interdisciplinary artist challenging and blurring the boundaries between traditional and digital media.
My work explores human perceptions of place memory, time and identity through the creation and merging of painting, drawing, photography and exploratory digital creation strategies, creating multi-dimensional works that challenge fixed notions of time and place.
I describe them variously as ‘timescapes ’ and ‘memoryscapes’; this is a metaphysical, psycho-geographical interpretation of accepted notions of contemporary landscape art.
My working process is alchemical and serendipitous: a fusion of many photographic moments and memories of a place, with paintings or drawings created in or of that place - greater than the sum of its parts.
They are palimpsests: layers upon layers, partially obliterated, layered again, written and overwritten, with glimpses of other places, other times still partly visible.
In these layers lie the imprint of lives led, traces left, memories half recalled, a sense of place that is felt rather than remembered. In the long shadow of COVID, the layers trap and record a fractured world in time.This series of works is a record of that love/hate relationship it is possible to have with the place one grew up, and specifically of the experience of growing up and living year-round in a seaside, tourist town. It’s about my relationship with my home town of Torbay but it is also a wider chronicle of human relationships to place and how they shape us and our view of the world.It’s part love letter, part social commentary/critique.
This body of work seeks to evoke the dissonance between the obvious and accepted natural beauties of a coastal resort, and the realities of living in it year-round - closed down for the winter, drugs, unemployment, boredom.
There is a visual dissonance between the subject matter and the visually pleasing, painterly aspects of these works. At first glance, a pretty seascape, but the subject matter may be less pretty - the rusting, underside of the pier, the cheap, rundown seaside buildings, the shadowy figures.
There is also a visual disturbance in the layered imagery, a sensation of fragmented moments, many days, many scenes, all the same, happening all at once or at any time.
There are several repeating visual themes or motifs in the work:
I) The architecture of the seaside environment - Instantly recognisable icons of the seaside town, with all those connotations. But shelters and piers have different uses for locals or out of season, and notions of public and private spaces become blurred. (homeless places to sleep, illicit spaces to take drugs or sexual encounters).
II) The repeating band of figures - my Greek chorus, standing simultaneously for everyone and no one; anonymous, ever present, shadowy, transient, unknown. Like tourists, they are an amorphous ‘pack’, indistinguishable from another, and they are everywhere.
III) Colour. The almost “too perfect” tonal palette of blues, which comes from the overlay of paintings in the works. Seductive and attractive, but also almost a pastiche of the seaside postcard world of blue skies and saturated chromatic colour.Mixed Media |Layered, Digitised Drawings, Oil Painting and Original Photography
Individual Sizes 13x10cm
Unframed and Mounted On Aluminium Panel
Open Edition