BIO
Melina Bishop is a sculptor and installation artist. She has shown independently with Vignettes at Generations (Seattle,WA) and her work has been included in group exhibitions at Praxis Fiber Gallery (Cleveland, OH), Soil Gallery (Seattle, WA), The Hoffman Gallery, Surplus Space, Supermaker and galleryHOMELAND (Portland, OR). She was a 2016 resident artist at the Icelandic Textile Center (Blönduós, IS) and a member of the studio collective Neighbors at the Yale Union (Portland, OR) from 2015 to 2019. She graduated from Oregon College of Art and Craft with a BFA in Fibers in 2015 and will graduate with an MFA in Visual Art from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in May 2021.
STATEMENT
Central to my practice is the soft, the fluid and the undefined. I author objects that are intentionally difficult to categorize, that make someone think twice, perhaps settling finally for an “and/and” when an “either/or” is refused. The work asks for people to think with their bodies, feel with their minds, converse in silent languages. Sometimes the work is slippery. It wants to be felt as it slides through fingers rather than caught and analyzed. It often pushes up against utilitarianism but then, through unorthodox material choices and abstraction of form, doesn’t meet expectations.
I employ a specific kind of abstraction, tied to a history of female sculptors, which Jenni Sorkin describes in her essay Five Propositions on Abstract Sculpture as “a sensitivity to the texture and tactility of objects and a disquieting intensity devoted to the process of making them." Formal abstraction is also a method of denying literalism and asking for alternative understandings of objects, materials and their relationship to the human. The work encourages the rejection of assumptions about what an object is or does. Extended further, I strive to create forms that can serve as tools for fostering the kind of thinking that challenges hierarchical, exclusionary “norms” within society and culture.
*View CV
INTERVIEWS
New Lives for Broken Things, Vignettes, Articles
In The Studio, Duplex Gallery, Blog
CONTACT
Email: melinaskye@gmail.com
Instagram: @melinaskye
