Melanie Young
Melanie is an artist working with ideas of motherhood, inheritance, and female institutions primarily through painting. Her wider practice includes collaborative performance and installation.
Melanie uses the immediacy of the painted surface to try and explore ideas of family, and its histories through multiple generations, and to identify and focus upon something unsettling about the impact of tradition or inheritance on women. This philosophical space has occupied her throughout her practice and is currently manifesting in an exploration of the effect of historical mistreatment by The Catholic Church, the medical profession and the patriarchy on both her aunt and Mother.
She is particularly driven by the materiality and visceral quality of paint and through her artistic process works at building up and scraping back surfaces which in her works evidence the passage of time, the emergence of memory and the constantly revealed and concealed presence of the past.
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Melanie Young is a visual artist based in Cornwall. Alongside her own discrete practice, she is also one half of ‘The Splendid Sisters’ a collaborative multimedia arts practice and is co-director of Open The Box Arts. OBTA has a deep belief in socially engaged arts practice and a curiosity which they explore through research and making. They take great pleasure in their collaborative practice where the outcomes are enriched, enhanced and emboldened by their collective endeavour.
As The Splendid Sisters they create artworks (taking the form of performance, installation and film) that shine a light on the mysterious process of grief, loss and its resolution. Their practice encompasses choreography, improvisation and storytelling to create thought provoking experiences.