Departure 3 (2023)

Description

Melanie’s paintings keeps you guessing. Is this an aerial view of bare land, or just paint, worked until it becomes a landscape of its own? She harnesses that doubt on purpose. Each piece is less a picture of a place than a record of having stood in one. They are memories turned into texture and depth, not photographs.

She builds her surfaces with gravity and chance as much as intention, letting impasto and dusted pigment settle into peaks and troughs that read like terrain. The titles come first, often a grid reference or a place name, and shape everything that follows, so each painting becomes a mark of where something happened.