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| Melissa Harvey creating a cotton pulp wall installation at Sydney College of the Arts |
Melissa Harvey is a Sydney based artist who predominantly works with cotton pulp sprayed onto wall surfaces and silk screens to create site specific installations and large scale sculptural paper works. The textural residue of surfaces and spaces that Melissa inhabits evoke a sense of place. Her experiences of the materiality of places informs her practice, such as different urban visual and textural surfaces of concrete, bitumen, rubble, sand and cement of the city skin. With contrasting tones, Melissa also conjures the sparkling effect of sunlight or night-lights on water. Her works have an immersive soft, textured, layered surface. The pulp material is made from recycled cotton clothing and domestic cloth, which is developed through a process of tearing and cutting fabric, then crushing down the cloth in a beating machine. The final process of spraying the pulp forms an open-ended space for thought and memory. Melissa recently completed a Masters in Fine Arts at Sydney College of the Arts and was a finalist in the Fremantle Print Prize.
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Melissa Harvey, Dark Matter, 2017, recycled cotton pulp and ink on paper
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I have recently begun a new body of work, collecting textures from bushland surrounding Sydney. During my residency at Gunyah I plan to expand on these investigations documenting bushland textures via photographs, drawings and rubbings. I am also interested in how the light changes throughout the day and reflects off surfaces. I will be writing a response to each texture discovered in the moment of the experience, as a record of my emotional response to reflect on later in my studio practice.
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| Melissa Harvey, The Haptic, 2016, recycled cotton pulp and ink on canvas and wall |
You can see more of Melissa's work at www.melissajharvey.com
