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Mellony Taper’s multifaceted interdisciplinary practice sits somewhere at the intersection of trad and new media. Often working with digital photography as a raw material (like a lump of clay), she makes multi-layered works that dispute traditional definitions of creative mediums - whether that be photography, painting, drawing, moving image or 3D. Taper creates across all these channels, finding ways to fuse the elements - either digitally or in their subsequent 3-dimensional manifestation as finished works.
The conception of her work as a successive series of palimpsests is intentional and important: an alchemy of many layers overwritten, obliterated, altered; merging to create something new. Older works are layered into newer ones, creating an ongoing link between the past, present and future; echoing the way her work evolves in interlinking series’. Recent work has been figurative: exploring themes of visibility and invisibility; motherhood; displacement and belonging. In so doing she creates space to encounter and consider both individual and broader collective experiences. |
2023 exhibitions include: ‘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; the Royal West of England Academy Photo Open; and Procreate Project Public Activations at Lewisham Shopping Centre, London.
She is a member of: the RWA Artist Network; ProCreate Project’s living archive of works by international artist-mother practitioners; and those amazing artist champions ArtCan.Org In 2022 Taper was commissioned to explore and respond to the effect of 500 days of pandemic closure on regional theatres; the subsequent Spotlight project was funded by Arts Council England, facilitated by Arts and Heritage and ably supported by Artizan CIC in Devon. 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. In collaboration with Director Barry Wilkinson, she is currently co-producing a commissioned series of new short films ARTSTORIES . Taper has also been strategically and curatorially instrumental in the development of ARTPORT - an arts festival on the North Somerset coast. |