RWA Photo Open exhibition preview | 2023
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Film still from ‘Artifex Cohibita’ short film | 2022
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Mellony Taper |
b. London, 1970
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Mellony Taper’s interdisciplinary practice sits somewhere at the intersection of trad and digital media: drawing/photography/and increasingly sound and time-based media. Often working with digital photography as a raw material - like paint or charcoal - she creates multi-layered works that challenge the boundaries between photography, painting and drawing.
Cultivating a visual ambivalence in her work, she intervenes in identifiable signifiers such as the figures, architecture, landmarks, the body or the landscape itself. 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 describes her practice as. “a liminal thing: belonging neither to one state nor another; one medium nor 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 major 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 Royal West of England Academy Photography Open exhibition, celebrating contemporary photographic practice in all its forms; and ‘Women in Photography’ at the Glasgow Gallery of Photography, an exhibition marking International Women’s Day and showcasing women artists from across the globe working within the photographic medium. 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. |