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Mellony Taper’s interdisciplinary practice sits somewhere at the intersection of trad and new media. Often working with digital photography as a raw material, she works outside any single ‘maker definition’, making works that don’t much care about accepted definitions of photography, drawing, moving image or sculpture. Taper works across all these mediums, often fusing them during the making process.
She is interested in how new media art manifests itself in the world, and there is a subtext to her practice that calls out value judgements and prejudices about how digital art is made. Since the birth of her daughter a decade ago, the genesis of Taper’s work has been shaped by domestic borders: digital, photographic works manifesting themselves in the memorabilia - and subsequently - the fabrics of a home. First: family photographs; then, fabrics: household linens, bedcovers, towels, napkins, tissues…’Artifex Domestica’. As her practice strained at the seams of trying to make work as a care-giver, and within constrained domestic spaces, she created work using and misusing household objects and linens, under the umbrella label of ‘Domestic Use Only’: loaded with implicit ambivalence regarding her place as an artist in both the home and the wider world. Taper is increasingly interested in the boundaries imposed by the labelling and categorisation of art, and how digital, lens- and screen-based and other forms of ‘new media art’ manifest themselves in the world. This has become an analogy for her ambivalence surrounding the multifarous roles of mother : daughter : care-giver : artist. |
Recent exhibitions include: ‘Found Cities, Lost Objects: Women in the City’, curated for the Arts Council by Lubaina Himid CBE; the Royal West of England Academy Photo Open; and Procreate Project Public Activations at Lewisham Shopping Centre, London.
Mellony Taper trained as a sculptor under the direction of Keir Smith at Wimbledon School of Art (Now UAL). Even then her practice was multidisciplinary, encompassing, amongst other things: traditional casting methods, construction, photography, site-specific works and drawing. She is a member of the Royal West of England Academy’s Artist Network; Procreate Project’s living archive of artist-mother practitioners, and those amazing art champions ArtCan.org. In January 2024 she was elected an Academician of the South West Academy of Fine & Applied Arts.
Mellony Taper trained as a sculptor under the direction of Keir Smith at Wimbledon School of Art (Now UAL). Even then her practice was multidisciplinary, encompassing, amongst other things: traditional casting methods, construction, photography, site-specific works and drawing. She is a member of the Royal West of England Academy’s Artist Network; Procreate Project’s living archive of artist-mother practitioners, and those amazing art champions ArtCan.org. In January 2024 she was elected an Academician of the South West Academy of Fine & Applied Arts.