Melanie Young Cornwall and Isles of Scilly, United Kingdom

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I am a visual artist, based near the Lizard peninsular in Cornwall. My practice encompasses painting, film, installation and engagement. I am currently collaborating with a dance artist and a filmmaker creating intallations that use sound score, film and visual arts to explore story and history.

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.