TAPER, MELLONY
FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT
PHOTOGRAPH
2022
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 blur the boundaries between media.
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 reflection of this. “
Taper’s 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.
Actively rejecting the slick and predetermined outcomes of tools such as Photoshop, she will manually work into the surface of the digital image, manipulating it with fingers directly on the screen, as she would with charcoal on paper. She often refers to her works as palimpsests – layers constantly overwritten and partially erased.
Endlessly iterative, a piece may go through many incremental changes in its evolution. Working digitally means that each evolution can be saved in its own right, creating a succession of visual echoes.
Cultivating a visual ambivalence in her work, she intervenes in identifiable signifiers such as figures, architecture, landmarks, time, the body or the landscape itself.
