Zanny Mellor

Zanny Mellor’s abstract artwork addresses energy, space, light and time through minimalist and gestural forms. Working across painting, collage, alternative photography and installation, she explores a sense of impermanence and transformation by comparing timeframes within the body, mind and landscape. Her tempered gestural and abstract language varies between bold and high contrast, to more subtle approaches with tonal gradients. Paint seems to ebb and flow in slowly built layers or is removed at speed. Mark-making is intuitive and deliberate, where fluidity creates a tension between control and chance that energises the painting experience. Multi-exposure paintings made in the darkroom use light as an agent to capture the shadows of brief, gestural movements of paint which are fixed within the surface of photographic paper. Moments are layered in repetitive passes to create dense mark-making and each photogram print is ultimately unique. More recently a return to colour and a shift into collage can be seen as a reaction to our un-colourful lives during periods of lockdown. Intensely coloured works on paper are a visual expression of the positivity needed at this time and a craving for the multidimensional life we were used to. Travelling again, Mellor is exploring colour palettes and textures away from home and beginning to work between painting, sculpture and photography within the landscape itself.