Please join us for the exhibition preview on
Saturday, 16th May, 2PM - 4PM. |
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All This Useless Beauty' is a new solo exhibition of work by artist Mellony Taper, winner of the 2025 THG Open.
Abandoned heirlooms and reimagined household objects of mysterious provenance have been infiltrated by imposters, letting us know that all is not quite what it seems amongst these seemingly familiar items. Taper has seemingly collected belongings that belong nowhere: in introducing them to these gallery spaces she makes us reconsider their usefulness - both in the home and the wider world - and reminds us that our beautiful galleries were once a home. Tiny, vintage dresses tell us this is a female “household”, and these are female stories, inviting us to consider how inherited experience and repeating generational patterns have shaped women’s lives. Mellony Taper says of her work: “Bigger truths can be revealed in the telling of small stories. I am interested in the everyday, the unremarked and unrecorded, and in domestic narratives that span generations, class and circumstance. My narratives are very much a female perspective: - daughters, mothers, sisters. I like the idea of the hidden histories that vintage domestic objects carry with them. “I want these works to feel like inherited objects, domestic relics; I use them to present fragments of real or reimagined histories: giving hints of lives that are both familiar and strange. They are deliberately incomplete records and imperfect navigations of the ever-shifting perceptions of memory, time and experience”. _________ Mellony Taper is a British interdisciplinary artist. Her work has been exhibited widely across the UK and is regularly selected for prize exhibitions. She is an Academician of the South West Academy and a member of the Royal West of England Academy Artist Network. Her work is included in ProCreate Project’s living archive of work by artist-mothers and formed part of the 2023 series of ProCreate Public Activations across London. In 2023 Taper was invited to create work for the exhibition “Found Cities, Lost Objects: Women in the City” curated by Turner Prize-winner and cultural activist Lubaina Himid CBE, during its tenure at the Royal West of England Academy. She is the winner of the 2025 Thelma Hulbert Art Prize for her work ‘Trousseau”. |
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