BIO
Melissa Stewart is an emerging visual artist currently studying Fine Art BA (Hons).
Thematic Concerns:
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My practice explores themes of duration, as a time-based experience, and space, as observed and experienced from a liminal perspective. My work centers on situating interventions into an existing setting to memorialize an experiential account of its auratic qualities. This phenomenological engagement attempts to shift our perception beyond what is visible, towards an embodied account of time and place. Oftentimes, there exists a state of ambiguity or intangibility in my work that situates itself at an ephemeral threshold. In mapping the impermanence of sensations I encounter, there exists the indexical traces of something that was fleetingly present in the past that is often passively ignored or forgotten. The intention of my work is to make visible a palimpsest of these traces and breach the in-between. This shifting quazi-perspective intrigues me and provides fresh encounters for the viewer on the residue of our spatiotemporal experience.
Studio Methodology:
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Mediums that are transient in nature are useful for tracing and mapping ephemeral work. Light and sound interest me as they are relational materials that we do not perceive directly. They are passively understood by the ways in which they interact with other materials and surfaces. They each carry energy and momentum that can be detected, manipulated, and pinned to a surface to form an indexical trace. As both subject and material, light and (to a latter extent) sound, have become a primary medium in my practice for tracing the past presence and the presence of absence.