Statement & bio |
MULTI-DISCIPLINARY ARTIST WORKING AT THE INTERSECTION OF TRAD AND DIGITAL MEDIA
I am an artist working with traditional, digital and time based media. My work is about people and places; I describe them as psychogeographies. I like to work in series’, producing bodies of work connected to a particular place or idea.
My working process is endlessly iterative: a piece may go through many infinitesimal, incremental changes in its evolution. Working digitally means that each evolution can be saved in its own right, creating a succession of visual echoes.
My working process is endlessly iterative: a piece may go through many infinitesimal, incremental changes in its evolution. Working digitally means that each evolution can be saved in its own right, creating a succession of visual echoes.
PSYCHOGEOGRAPHIES
My work explores psychogeographies: people interacting with places, and the impacts of each upon the other.
I cultivate a visual ambivalence in my work that reflects innate tensions and obfuscates or plays with identifiable signifiers such as time, architecture, landmarks. The resulting constructs challenge fixed notions of time and place; reflecting instead metaphysical human experiences of place, experience and memory.
My work explores psychogeographies: people interacting with places, and the impacts of each upon the other.
I cultivate a visual ambivalence in my work that reflects innate tensions and obfuscates or plays with identifiable signifiers such as time, architecture, landmarks. The resulting constructs challenge fixed notions of time and place; reflecting instead metaphysical human experiences of place, experience and memory.
Previous recent bodies of work have focused on the romanticisation of geography vs the lived experience of daily life there (such as living year round in a tourist destination). In new work, I’m exploring daily experience of urban environments; the visual archaeology of the urban spaces we inhabit, of cityscapes at street level: - the incremental layerings of time, and human imprints, like layers of bill posters on a derelict building.
Three current, interconnecting series’ of work - “Visual Archaeology”, “Renamed City” and “Urban Fables” - examine and reflect the changing urban inner-city environment. These disruptive landscapes are a kind of visual archaeology, an excavation of anthropology and cultural history from the cityscape. What will “city centres” be? Mausoleums to bricks and mortar retail; cathedrals to our fetishisation of the purchase of takeaway coffee.
I live in Bristol, a city that has recently found itself at the centre of current events: statues torn down, spaces reclaimed, history rewritten by new voices - voices that didn’t get to write it the first time around. We are a Renamed City. And whilst it is true that every city is a composite of its layers, constantly over built and overwritten, language and nomenclature are important. Our history and the history of place lives on in names - of streets, buildings, districts - often far longer than in any other record. What happens when we erase all traces of history; what else might be lost?
- Mellony Taper, 2022
Three current, interconnecting series’ of work - “Visual Archaeology”, “Renamed City” and “Urban Fables” - examine and reflect the changing urban inner-city environment. These disruptive landscapes are a kind of visual archaeology, an excavation of anthropology and cultural history from the cityscape. What will “city centres” be? Mausoleums to bricks and mortar retail; cathedrals to our fetishisation of the purchase of takeaway coffee.
I live in Bristol, a city that has recently found itself at the centre of current events: statues torn down, spaces reclaimed, history rewritten by new voices - voices that didn’t get to write it the first time around. We are a Renamed City. And whilst it is true that every city is a composite of its layers, constantly over built and overwritten, language and nomenclature are important. Our history and the history of place lives on in names - of streets, buildings, districts - often far longer than in any other record. What happens when we erase all traces of history; what else might be lost?
- Mellony Taper, 2022