ABOUT MELANIE

Melanie’s artistic practice spans painting and installation, delving into themes of motherhood, inheritance, and the structures shaping women’s lives. Through the materiality of paint—its texture, fragility, and resistance—Melanie explores the layered nature of memory. By building up and scraping back surfaces, she mirrors the ebb and flow of familial narratives and their unresolved legacies.

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In addition to painting, Melanie creates installations using reclaimed domestic furniture. These familiar, worn objects become vessels of lived experience, allow her to explore the tension between inheritance, silence, and resistance to erasure. This dynamic between the intimate and the institutional is at the heart of her work.

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Currently, Melanie is exploring the historical mistreatment of working-class northern women by the Catholic Church, the medical profession, and patriarchal systems, particularly focusing on her mother and aunt. Through fragmentation, layering, and material transformation, Melanie considers how intergenerational trauma is embodied, embedded in domestic spaces, and woven into identity. While rooted in personal narrative, this work also speaks to broader themes of complicity, silence, and resilience.