Mel Perkins

Mel Perkins is enrolled in Old Jet’s Airspace programme for emerging artists.

She graduated with a Fine Arts degree from Derby University in 2019, and is now developing her multidisciplinary practice, focusing mainly on photography, painting and sculpture.

Materiality is as fundamental to Mel’s practice as theme and subject matter. In her current work, which examines coastal erosion, she is experimenting with carving hanging sculptures from expanding insulation foam, painted in black and earth tones, and printing underwater photographs on watercolour paper.

Describing making art as a ‘bodily and intrinsic process’, Mel works instinctively. For the featured abstract pieces, taken from her series titled ‘Addiction’, she painted multiple sheets of paper with her fingers as well as a brush, using gestural mark-making to explore the repetitive nature of compulsive behaviour.

Inside the circles, the repeated images overlap, shifting incrementally each time, exploring how different states of addiction evolve out of each other, and how, as humans, we keep making the same choices, and then new ones.

At its core, the work embodies the impulsive need of the artist to make art, over and over.

Mel scans, crops and digitally manipulates these images into circular form, then prints them directly on to aluminium, to capture the intense darkness of the subject matter, without the interference of reflective glass.

Her work is mainly monochromatic, inspired by the richly contrasting photography of Horst P Horst, the abstract expressionism of early black-and-white Jackson Pollock and the multi-disciplinary practice of Robert Rauschenberg.