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Mellony Taper’s interdisciplinary practice sits somewhere at the intersection of trad and digital media: drawing/photography/3D and sometimes sound and time-based media. Often working with digital photography as a raw material, she creates multi-layered works that challenge the boundaries between these mediums (and perhaps the perceived artistic merit attached to each).
Cultivating a visual ambivalence in her work, she intervenes in identifiable signifiers such as figures, architecture, landmarks, the body or the landscape itself, in such a way that the narrative cannot be fixed to any one time or place. Her current work represents a shift to the body, which has evolved from an examination of her existence and practice, post-motherhood, to a far wider conversation about the visible and invisible “ties that bind” women in their lives today. Taper has described her practice as: a somewhat liminal thing: belonging neither to one state nor another; one medium or another. In very real terms, I exist as an artist at the edges and in-between spaces of my own life, and my practice is both a product and a reflection of this. |
In 2022 she was selected for a solo project to explore and respond to the effect of 500 days of pandemic closure on regional theatres; The Spotlight Project was funded by Arts Council England and supported by Arts and Heritage.
Forthcoming exhibitions in 2023 include the The Royal West of England Academy Photo Open, a landmark exhibition celebrating contemporary photographic practice in all its forms; and ‘Found Cities, Lost Objects: Women in the City’, a national touring exhibition curated for the Arts Council Collection by Turner Prize-winning artist and cultural activist Lubaina Himid CBE. She has recently joined the ProCreate Project’s living archive of works by international artist-mother practitioners. Mellony Taper trained as a sculptor under the direction of Keir Smith at Wimbledon School of Art (Now UAL) when it was the last remaining independent of the historic London art schools. Even then her practice was multidisciplinary, spanning traditional casting methods, photography, site-specific works and drawing. She is Marketing Director of ArtPort and Portishead Arts Festival and is currently co-producing a newly commissioned series of short films | ARTSTORIES | profiling the thriving artist community of Portishead, on the edge of the Severn Sea. Taper occasionally writes on the arts and other animals. |