Visible Mending, solo exhibition at Motomoto Gallery, Arao, Kyushu, Japan

Becoming Aware, 2025. Oil paint on linen cotton thread, 8” x 8” x 3” on stretcher

Reception: 31 May 1 pm - 7 pm

31 May - 7 July 2025

749-4 Honide, Arao
Kumamoto 864-0012
Japan
09054898302

Visible Mending

stories, stitches, tears, and repairs

Visible Mending exhibition is a selection of embroidered drawings from 3 separate but connected bodies of work: Timekeeper, Common Threads and Mourning Piece. Each work meditates on human imperfection, temporality, and memory through the repetitive, embodied gesture of stitching—a practice that evokes the unconscious rhythms of care, loss, and repair. 

Origin, 2025. Oil paint on linen cotton thread, 12” x 12” x 3” on stretcher + maple frame

I would like to extend a huge thank you to Hanako Miyamoto for her dedication to the arts and for this opportunity to LIVE AND WORK at ARTIST RESIDENCY AIR MOTOMOTO and to exhibit at MOTOMOTO gallery!

The FRIENDSHIP, research, guided tours, museum visits and meetings she organized for us wERE above and beyond anything I could ever have expected!

arigato gozaimasu Hanako - sama

Many many thanks also to Miya Hannan who selflessly translated for me for the month of visits and visitors, and without whom I would have been completely lost in a region where few speak English, and supermarket shelves are stocked with unfamiliar products…. :)

Installation image of Visible Mending exhibition, Motomoto gallery, Arao, Kyushu, Japan

TIMEKEEPER

STATEMENT

The Timekeeper series hovers between embroidery, painting, drawing, and soft sculpture—each one a spiral quietly tracing time and memory. The spiral becomes a visual mantra, embodying the existential dilemma and delight of living within unstoppable time: its relentless forward motion, its circling returns, and our deeply human impulse to mark its passage.

Stitch by stitch, the spiral grows outward from a central origin, echoing the cyclical nature of life and the quiet energy spirals produce. Like the rings in a tree trunk, each line of stitching maps time, emotion, and experience—capturing heartbreaks, joys, injuries, revisited again and again as the stitch line returns on itself while persistently moving forward. The humanness of each sometimes-wonky stitch is intentional, a mark of presence and vulnerability. They are records of lived time.

Gardens of layered oil paint lie beneath the embroidered stitches on the linen substrate, while hidden Morse code messages whisper from within the stitches—emitting secret transmissions, an archive of invisible information embedded in the work. These messages are not always meant to be decoded, but rather felt, like a pulse or breath.

With each Timekeeper, I focus on the journey of the stitch, the act of marking time, the intimacy of repetition. What may appear futile becomes, instead, a meditation, where imperfection and process animate each spiral, giving it an energy of its own.

Installation image of Timekeepers at the Visible Mending exhibition, Motomoto gallery, Arao, Kyushu, Japan

yes, yes, yes, actually NO 8” x 8” x 2” oil paint and cotton thread on linen, 2025. PRIVATE COLLECTION

Installation image of Timekeepers and Mourning Piece at Visible Mending exhibition, Motomoto gallery, Arao, Kyushu, Japan

Detail of Dreaming a Life, 24” x 24” oil paint on linen, with hand embroidery, 2025

Installation image of Lightbulbs from Common Threads series and Mourning Piece at Visible Mending exhibition, Motomoto gallery, Arao, Kyushu, Japan

Mourning Piece #51 silk organza, tea stained cyanotype and hand embroidered cotton thread, 10” x 10”

Installation image of Lightbulbs from Common Threads series and Timekeeper, Becoming Aware 8” x 8” x 2” at Visible Mending exhibition, Motomoto gallery, Arao, Kyushu, Japan

Installation image of Lightbulbs from Common Threads series, each 7” x 7“ oil paint and cotton thread on canvas, 2025, at Visible Mending exhibition, Motomoto gallery, Arao, Kyushu, Japan

EXHIBITION ESSAY/REFLECTIONS

By Madoka Muramatsu

Visible Mending - Reclaiming the Wounds

“I don’t quite know why, but I’ve been drawn to the image of the lightbulb.”

The artist explained, standing before the audience gathered to hear her speak.

Frances Melhop.

For many years, she stood at the forefront of the fashion industry as a photographer for some of the world’s most iconic magazines—Vogue, Elle, Marie Claire, and more—often shaping narrative-rich, ethereal editorials. 

Now, she devotes herself to fine art—where her hands return, again and again, to the tactile, the intimate, and the handmade, seeking what was lost in the rise of the digital.

During the gallery talk, Frances spoke about how her years as a fashion photographer continue to shape her work as an artist.

“I’m endlessly fascinated by the human presence that reveals itself through imperfection. That’s where I find beauty. Back when I worked in fashion, if a model had a little gap between her teeth, I’d fall in love with that detail—and that’s when I’d press the shutter.”

The world seen through the camera’s viewfinder and the one traced by hand—her work was born in the layers where those two converged. She breathed and thrived in that in-between.

And now, through her art, it seems to me that she is reclaiming the depth, time, space, and texture that once vanished into the digital. 

I had been asked to interpret for the audience at the reception that followed her talk. But just minutes before arriving, I knew almost nothing about Frances or her work. The request came so suddenly—while I was in motion—I barely had time to reply, let alone research.

So there I was, standing among a room full of visitors seeing her work for the first time in Japan, listening to the artist’s voice as one of them.

Her first solo exhibition in Japan held space for both mourning and hope—works that honored lives abruptly taken, and others that offered quiet assurance for lives still unfolding, and those yet to begin. Presented under the title Visible Mending, the exhibition featured pieces meticulously hand-stitched with time, care, and presence—each thread a visible trace of restoration.

“There’s something—though I can’t quite name it—that makes me feel there’s a link between women and lightbulbs,” Frances said.

“Take, for example, Atsuko Tanaka, the Japanese artist who once caught the world’s attention with a dress made entirely of lightbulbs. Or, Ewa Partum who made performances draped solely in electric cable and glowing light bulbs. Or, how, in the past, most of the people who worked in lightbulb factories were women... I can’t explain exactly how these things connect, but I feel it’s significant.”

Standing before a wall of delicately stitched lightbulbs, her voice warmed with intensity.

“I just feel this thread between women and lightbulbs, and I keep stitching them. Maybe it’s the shape, too. It’s round and bulbous—womb-like, in a way. If you flip it upside down, it even resembles a breast.”

“And the light it emits. The idea of a lightbulb being switched on… we use it as a symbol for inspiration, don’t we? I haven’t reached a definitive reason why, but I feel a connection between the image of the lightbulb and the feminine. These works carry that meaning with them.”

 I had never once considered a connection between women and lightbulbs.

 I'm not particularly well-versed in art, and I didn’t know anything about the lightbulb dress she mentioned. I’d never heard that it was mostly women who made lightbulbs in factories.

But when she spoke about the shape of the lightbulb—how it reminded her of the womb—something inside me stirred.

 Faintly, but surely, a lightbulb switched on within me.

I stayed focused on my role as interpreter throughout the event—but later, as I exchanged personal words with the artist, that little light within me began to grow brighter. 

Womb. Woman. Feminine. Disappearance. Body. Light...

 The words we exchanged seemed to cross paths, uncannily, with the very themes and symbols that had smoldered inside me for years—stubbornly unresolved, now becoming, at last, ready to transform into a new form.

A flash of associations streaked through me.

In Japanese mythology, the sun goddess Amaterasu once hid herself in a cave, plunging the world into darkness.

In yogic tradition, Shakti—the feminine creative force—is seen as the energy that animates life.

“Our femininity,” someone once told me, “is like light. You can cover it, but you cannot extinguish it.”

They flooded back — vivid and radiant — like a reminder of the truth I had always known deep inside.

Light fell once more on memories of old wounds.

Wounds I had washed clean, over and over and over again.

 And with the light came a half-forgotten ache.

Slow, steady, and deep in my chest.

The wounds feared being buried for good in the depths of my darkness, unseen and unspoken.

“I was here.”

With the light, the hidden wounds began to take shape.

“I am here.”

“I’m still here.”  

“Don’t pretend I never was.”

*********************

A lightbulb holds light.

Not because of its shape,

but because of what it holds within.

That— is why it shines.

*********************

Forgive me

for pretending not to see you.

I’m not making you invisible.

I won’t.

I can’t. 

Because you are a part of me.

You struggled hard to bring me here.

 You are my tears.

Precious, warm, strong,  

and mine.

We each carry a lightbulb.

 A sacred vessel, capable of illuminating the dark.

When unlit, this clear glass form quietly hides into the dark around it.

 But the current that can light it lives within us.

To cradle.

To alchemize.

 To flow.

To shine.

The source of that light— is me.

Frances’ lightbulbs are tenderly stitched with a gaze full of compassion, speaking for our wounds, our imperfections, and the grace they carry.

As if mending a garment that mattered.

Through these embroidered bulbs, we may remember our own rough seams, or the tears in time that never quite closed —with old aches that return, uninvited.  

And perhaps,

only then,

can we begin to complete the mending,

with our own tangible hands.

Not to hide the wounds. 

But to cherish them.

As proof that we lived, raw and real 

And to radiate

in the whole truth

of who we really are.

END

Madoka Muramatsu - Bio

Language & Life Coach / Executive Coach | Writer | Former News Journalist, Speechwriter, and Interpreter/Translator

Madoka Muramatsu is a bilingual coach and writer/editor whose work centers on transformation — through language acquisition, speech delivery, embodied presence, and inner alignment.

Muramatsu began her career as a field reporter and investigative journalist with Jiji Press, one of Japan’s two major national wire services, covering politics, international relations, U.S. military affairs, and socio-economic issues from Tokyo and Okinawa.

Her interviews with visiting high-level officials and her insightful, thought-provoking feature stories appeared not only on the agency’s platform but also in The Japan Times and The Japan News, two of Japan’s leading English-language newspapers.

Muramatsu later held a wide range of communications roles at the Embassy of South Africa and JOICFP (Japanese Organization for International Cooperation in Family Planning), serving as an official interpreter to the Ambassador and managing bilingual communications materials across digital platforms and media outreach.

At the Australian Embassy in Tokyo, she worked as Speechwriter to the Ambassador and Communications Officer, overseeing communications strategy, crafting and editing bilingual content, and strengthening press relations.

Throughout her career, Madoka has also contributed as a freelance journalist to major digital media platforms such as Yahoo! News Japan, combining journalistic insight with cross-cultural storytelling.

Raised in rural Kumamoto in southwestern Japan, she taught herself English without the privilege of immersion abroad. She went on to achieve a perfect TOEIC score (990), studied sociology and journalism as an exchange student at UC Berkeley, and later earned her B.A. in English Language Studies from Sophia University in Tokyo.

As a former journalist, Madoka trained her mind to distinguish fact from interpretation with razor-sharp clarity and sophistication. While she is trained to chase facts, her deepest allegiance is no longer to facts alone — it is to truth.

Business contact

Email: info@coaching-light.com
Website: https://coaching-light.com/about

Instagram: @thecoachmadoka

問い合わせ

メールアドレス：info@coaching-light.com
ウェブサイト：https://coaching-light.com/about

インスタグラム：@thecoachmadoka

Lightbulb 3 from Common Threads series, each 7” x 7“ oil paint and cotton thread on canvas, 2025, at Visible Mending exhibition, Motomoto gallery, Arao, Kyushu, Japan

Our wonderful team at Motomoto Gallery. Frances Melhop, Hanako Miyamoto, Miya Hannan, and Madoka Muramatsu

The research and time to work on the “Visible Mending” exhibition and to take it to my first solo exhibition in Japan, was in part funded by an Artist Fellowship grant 2025 from the Nevada Arts Council with funding through the National Endowment for the Arts. Many many thanks to both organizations for this recognition.

Artist news: Nevada Arts Council Fellowship 2025 +++

Already most of the way through February 2025 and I thought it was about time to write an artist newsletter, because the last 12 months have been craaazzzy busy.

3 Graces, off set lithography on rice paper, a new process I learned in Mexico City, 2024. Image size 10.5” x 14” paper size 18” x 24”

First up I am really honored to announce that I have been awarded a Nevada Arts Council Fellowship for 2025. Thank you so much to the Nevada Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts for this generous recognition and award!

On January 26th PBS launched their ARTEFFECTS Episode that they filmed at the exhibition series Far Beyond the Walls a group of exhibitions I curated and installed inside the Nevada State Prison. Many thanks to Sandy, Guin and Dave for putting this together and spending so much time researching, filming and editing to produce such an insightful piece. It must have been a daunting edit with over 12 hours of footage to fit into a 10 minute slot. Hats off to the PBS Reno team!

You can view the ARTEFFECTS Episode here

The Far Beyond the Walls series of exhibitions grew and grew exponentially as I made more and more research over the last 2 years. Originally planned on being a single artist solo exhibition in one cell block, it became 9 solo exhibitions, 2 group shows and involved more than 35 artists, running for over 4 months.

Definitely one of the largest issues and exhibitions I have ever tackled, in the most labyrinthine and cramped carceral spaces. The brutally extreme temperatures with no air conditioning (which was by design for the visitors to feel the reality of prison), in addition to the relevant artwork, cells full of rodents and dust on 2-3 hour guided tours several times a week through the decommissioned prison, made it a visceral immersion. Extremely exhausting and heart rending. Many of the visitors could barely speak at the end of the visit, they were overcome with emotion from the dense atmosphere of the spaces, artwork that spoke - literally and figuratively, and the human experiences they were gaining insights into.

Having the keys to a prison was a very odd feeling as well.

Each day it took nearly 2 hours to open the cell blocks and spaces, find the breakers in the dungeons and turn on the electricity, check the exhibits - many of the install materials melted in the heat each day and had to be continually replaced and the artwork re installed. The tour then followed for 2-3 hours with another hour to close down the entire prison and make sure every cell block and entry was locked.

Needless to say by the end of October at uninstall I was fairly worn out. It was a humungous relief to hand over the keys of the prison to the Nevada State Prison Preservation Society, who are creating a museum at these historic buildings, which signified the founding of the State of Nevada. Far Beyond the Walls was a collaborative effort with NSPPS whose board members spent many many hours working on making the historic spaces workable.

More information about the Far Beyond the Walls artists and their work can be found on the EXHIBITION PAGE HERE

Earlier in the year PBS also made a podcast interview with me about the exhibitions which you can hear here.

Detail of a poem by Greg Kovner in the Lonely Buoy exhibition within the Far Beyond the Walls shows.

PBS PODCAST INTERVIEW

May 2024 saw my solo exhibition, tender material, curated by Maria Sorensen, installed at Dienstegebäude Art Space, Zurich, Switzerland.

Maria is an independent curator and writes for Index on Censorship Magazine. She has her own literary pages titled Cultural Matters on Substack.

Seeing the work suspended in a large dramatic industrial space, like a crowd of ghost dresses and liberated bodies was super energizing. The work felt airy, light, impactful, strong, mournful and joyful all at the same time.

More information about Common Threads can be found here

Common Threads series at tender material, Dienstegebäude Art Space, Zurich, Switzerland.

Mourning Piece at tender material, Dienstegebäude Art Space, Zurich, Switzerland.

Installation view of tender material , Dienstegebäude Art Space, Zurich, Switzerland.

If you are interested in the work, some of it can be found on Artsy through the gallery page here or contact hello@melhopgallery.com….you can view it to scale in a room on Artsy

Whispers Across Time are smaller works, related to Common Threads, a precursor really….They are blind contour monotype drawings with lino-cut interventions, on BFK Rives

that are available on the gallery COLLECT ART area here

Installation view of Whispers Across Time

 Whispers Across Time

As children we would sit in a circle and start the whisper game.

Each child would whisper what they heard to the next child, by the time it reached the end of the circle the whisper had changed beyond recognition. These monotypes are the visual equivalent. Read more here

9 of the Whispers Across Time series, see larger versions here

ZURICH, SWITZERLAND HIGHLIGHTS

Working with Maria Sorensen who curated tender material exhibition

Exploring the old town and some sneaky shopping with Maria

Studio visit with amazing artist and thinker Elisabeth Eberle

Discovering Hulda Zwingli at the Kunsthaus Museum

June saw a group show that I participated in as an artist and a curator in Zurich called Unsaid. UnSaid was a cross cultural curatorial collaboration with OnCurating Project Space. Curators; Maria Sorensen, Lara Sutter, Lynn Guo, Frances Melhop + Melhop Gallery, Evgenia Kostinskaia, and Zahira Mozafari presented their latest exhibition UnSaid. Diesnstegebaude Art Space, Zurich, Switzerland.

The group exhibition features work from artists in authoritarian and democratic countries, and is a joint reflection on censorship and repressive mechanisms at play.

More information about UnSaid can be found here

Absence #13 consists of an embroidered contour drawing of an empty female body. Floating outside the body are all of the dismembered parts we are not supposed to show for various reasons. Embroidered British linen, 84” × 48” cm. 2024

Early in the year I spent nearly 2 months in Mexico City researching the Mexican Art Fairs (which were utterly wonderful!!!!), working on 4 more pieces in the Common Threads series, then working with mentor Tal Frank and amazing artist Karen Cheirif, followed by a group show at Radio 28CS gallery.

Origen Compartido was curated by David Miranda the Curator of the Museo Experimental El Eco, CDMX.

Mexico City has an incredible energy and an incredibly edgey buoyant art scene, underground and above!

Group show Origen Compartido in Mexico City at the Radio 28CS gallery, curated by David Miranda of El Eco Museum

MEXICO HIGHLIGHTS

Museo del Arte Popolare

Stitching with the Fuentes Rojas group at the Coyote Fountain in Coyoacan in the memory of all the disappeared in Mexico. One handkerchief for each person lost. This has become an unofficial record of how many and who have been “disappeared.”

Detail of a handkerchief flying in the breeze at the Coyote Fountain in Coyoacan

Museo del Arte Popolare

Teotihuacan Pyramids outside Mexico City.

I mean it doesnt get much better than this!!!!

And for those who got through to the end of this email …a sneak preview of latest work in progress.

Work in Progress. Oil paint on linen with cotton embroidery 8” x 8” x 2” 2025

Titled Becoming Aware this is a small 8” x 8” piece before launching into some 4 foot x 4 foot painted and embroidered works, which I am pretty excited about.

I absolutely love drawing with thread, it has such an animated quality!

Hope that 2025 is treating you well so far, looking forward to hearing from you!

xxxx Frances

"UnSaid" group exhibition Zurich Switzerland

“I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent deliberate silence …”

Louise Glück in her 1995 essay „Disruption, Hesitation, Silence“

The group exhibition features work from artists in authoritarian and democratic countries and is a joint reflection on censorship and repressive mechanisms at play. Featuring artists from 

countries and backgrounds as diverse as Iran, Belarus, Turkey, Russia, China, Switzerland, 

Lithuania, Italy and US, it dwells on the issues of self-censorship, power dynamics and things we often don’t say or simply can’t.

The works on display in the exhibition speak of the aesthetic power of erasures, actively

transforming them to take control over actions that could leave one feeling powerless. Through

photography, textiles, video, poetry, paintings, and installations the artists turn these enforced

silences and erasures into thought provoking, bold, artistic statements and offer space for

public debate and intimate exchange.

Curatorial Concept 

UnSaid is a cross cultural curatorial collaboration with OnCurating Project Space. Curators; Maria Sorensen, Lara Sutter, Lynn Guo, Frances Melhop + Melhop Gallery, Evgenia Kostinskaia, and Zahira Mozafari present their latest exhibition UnSaid. Diesnstegebaude Art Space, Zurich, Switzerland.

Artist Statement

Absence #13 consists of an embroidered contour drawing of an empty female body. Floating outside the body are all of the parts we cannot show for various reasons. These parts are 

currently censored by social media and web platforms that alone decide what constitutes art and what is pornography or self-censored for safety and for other reasons.

The stitched figure is part of a series titled Common Threads, a salute to the 60’s – 90’s Feminist icons who used their body as material for their artwork, in this case the artist is referencing Ana Mendieta and her spaces of bodily absence that she created in her work.

The advances for women made by the Feminist artists and the overturn of Roe versus Wade case in the USA in 2022, suggests we might be moving backwards, losing some of their hard-won victories, such as autonomy of our own bodies.

The piece Absence #13 became playfully interactive as women visiting the exhibition inserted themselves between the canvas backing and the linen embroidered body.

CURATORIAL TEAM

Evgenia Kostinskaia, Maria Sorensen, Lynn Guo, Lara Sutter, and Zahira Mozafari
Frances Melhop + Melhop Gallery (absent)

"Tender Material" Solo Exhibition, Zurich, Switzerland

A huge thank you to curator Maria Sorensen for making this happen, to On Curating Project Space, and to The Nevada Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts who partially funded this project.

Frances Melhop

solo exhibition

Curated by: Maria Sorensen

Vernissage: 2 May 6-9 pm
Artist Talk: 2 May 6.30 pm
Aperitivo gathering: 4 May 6-9 pm
Finnisage: 10 May 6-9pm

EXHIBITION DATES: 2-10 May (visits other days by appointment, contact: maria.sorensen@zhdk.ch)

ADDRESS:       
DIENSTGEBÄUDE ART SPACE
Töpferstrasse 26 Zürich 8045
Switzerland

tender material

CURATORIAL STATEMENT by Maria Sorensen

In her landmark 1990 book Sexual Personae, feminist researcher and writer Camille Paglia used intellect to analyse art, history, and literature from classical times to the 19th century and argue that it is men who are the weaker sex because they have remained eternally powerless over their desire for the female body. It is female sexuality, she argued, that is humanity’s greatest force. Her tome helped catapult feminism beyond ideology of victimhood.

Tender Material reflects on impermanence, memory, fragility, being human and acknowledging our material physicality versus our lives through the screen. Treading a tightrope between women’s work, craft, and art, Frances Melhop’s human-size hand stitched series, Common Threads is a tribute to feminist artists who used their bodies as material creatively and artistically to break down barriers, taboos, restrictions, oppressive systems, and ideologies.

Simple pressure prints of dresses are overlaid with embroidered contour drawings of female bodies. Each dress has stories and memories attached to it, held within it.

Melhop’s delicate and tender textile and paper works highlight the interplay between fragility and toughness, exterior and interior, using nakedness and vulnerability as powerful tools of resistance.

Frances Melhop is a multidisciplinary visual artist born in Christchurch, New Zealand, living and working at Lake Tahoe, Nevada. She works in tactile mediums such as photography, printmaking, hand embroidery, sculpture and oil paint questioning and framing her perceptions of the world.  Frances is an award-winning photographer with a decades long career in fashion photography conceptualizing, and directing shoots for Vogue Pelle Italy, Vogue Gioelli, Italy, Vogue Australia and Elle Portugal. She holds MFA degree from University of Nevada, Reno, and has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions worldwide.

 Maria Sorensen is an independent art curator, writer, and researcher. Combining her experience of growing up in an authoritarian country with her background in Film and Visual Arts, her curatorial practice focuses on highlighting important societal issues using strong and powerful artistic language.

 She writes for Index on Censorship Magazine covering cultural and political issues and has previously worked for various film channels curating a World Cinema program. Having lived and worked in London, Copenhagen, and Tokyo she is currently based in Zurich, Switzerland where she collaborates with Zurich Film Festival.

 She has a BA in Linguistics and a CAS in Curatorial Practice from Zurich University of Arts.

tender material - installation view

tender material - installation view

tender material - installation view

Common Threads #3, rear view. Monotype - pressure print on BFK Rives 60” x 36” with contour drawing stitched in cotton thread, unframed, 2022 - 2024

Common Threads #4, rear view, Monotype - pressure print on BFK Rives 60” x 36” with contour drawing stitched in cotton thread, unframed, 2022 - 2024

Mourning Piece - tender material - installation view. Tea stained cyanotypes on cotton with embroidery, stitched on silk organza. 100” x 50” 2020

Mourning Piece #51- installation view. Tea stained cyanotype on cotton with embroidery, stitched on silk organza.

All the Things that Could Have Been - quilt. 77.5" x 29.5" ink on British linen with cotton embroidery, 2024

Detail of All the Things that Could Have Been - quilt.77.5" x 29.5" ink on British linen with cotton embroidery, 2024

Detail of All the Things that Could Have Been - quilt. 77.5" x 29.5" ink on British linen with cotton embroidery, 2024

All the Things that Could Have Been - monotype pressure prints and their ghost prints with embroidery, each 10” x 10” ink and cotton thread on BFK Rives paper, 2023- 2024

This project is supported in part by the Nevada Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. 

"ORIGEN COMPARTIDO" Exhibition CDMX

CURATOR: David Miranda of El Eco Experimental Museum, CDMX

LOCATION: Radio28CS Gallery,
Calle Venustiana Carranza #28, 06000, Mexico City

Installation View of Common Threads 2023 - 2024. Common threads #7, #3 and #2 each 60” x 36” ink and embroidery on BFK Rives paper.

Installation View of Common Threads 2023 - 2024. Common threads #7, #3 and #2 each 60” x 36” ink and embroidery on BFK Rives paper.

Installation View of Common Threads 2023 - 2024. Common threads #7, #3 and #2 each 60” x 36” ink and embroidery on BFK Rives paper.

Installation View of Common Threads 2023 - 2024. Common threads #1, 60” x 36” ink and embroidery on BFK Rives paper.

Artist Review of 2023

It appears that I havent written a newsletter or email as an artist for over 2 years… (shocked face) I guess much of my time has been spent looking after other artists at Melhop Gallery and making nomadic exhibitions - as a curator and gallery director. However here and there I have been carving out a little time to work on my own projects…

I am still finding it quite hard to believe the longest winter finally came to a melty end…and the latest one hasnt seemed to have got off the ground yet. Couch sized blocks of solid ice dropped off our roof in February, smashing all the outdoor furniture and the deck…grotesque car crash sounds as it creaked and groaned off. Snow this year is a non show.

 Onward and upward…

Jenna Ferrey and I had a wonderful - albeit utterly freezing booth in Chelsea, at FUTURE FAIR NYC, showing artists Stewart Francis Easton and Alex Stern, whose work was wonderfully in conversation and sparked a lot of interest including an article in ARTILLERY MAGAZINE NYC.

Jenna Ferrey of Trotter & Sholer, Marina Grainger of the Artist Advisory, and Frances Melhop at Future Fair Booth 2. These two New York babes seem to handle the freezing temperatures better than I do ….

 There has been some gREAT press coming out about some of my recent work … See below

Working in my art dungeon on one of the Common Threads series

Here below I am working in my winter studio slouchfit…. If you can bear to watch timelapse process videos – these new stitch drawings are what I have been working on whenever I can. The series is just starting.

COMMON THREADS

These life-size monotypes are a part of my quest to distill the essence of being human. Simple pressure prints of dresses are overlaid with embroidered contour drawings of female bodies. Each dress has stories and memories attached to it, held within it. These impressions are reaching for the familiar recollections absorbed into loved garments of friends and myself.

There was a lovely artist feature out in issue 37 of CREATE MAGAZINE July 2023 page 108-112 curated by Marina Grainger.

New Visionary Magazine NYC made a lovely interview and artist feature

 NEW VISIONARY COLLECTIVE NYC issue 6 May 2023

An artist feature in the very new ARTS FOR HEARTS MAGAZINE issue 2, Feb 2023

THE HAND MAGAZINE Jan, 2023 published some of the Whispers work in issue 39

WHISPERS ACROSS TIME

Artist Statement

As children we would sit in a circle and start the whisper game.
Each child would whisper what they heard to the next child, by the time it reached the end of the circle the whisper had changed beyond recognition. These works are the visual equivalent.

The image of each girl transitions through various processes, to become another translation of a portrait. The pathway goes from living person, to a photographic fragment a record of their existence, to a scanned file, to a computer screen, to a blind contour drawing in ink, with oil paint intervention, to a monotype print.

In ways related to surrealist strategies, I reach for the essence of the subject or idea through deep observation, releasing visual control and allowing the unexpected to unfold.

All the elements of the whisper game exist in these pieces - transformation, surprise, amusement, and wonder. An entirely new image appears in the form of a monotype drawing.

Each evolves like a whisper across time….

 Some of the series is still available through the gallery COLLECT ART area…. or you can see the whole series HERE ON THE ARTIST WEBSITE.

Whisper#6, Whispers Across Time… series, 2021
Monotype, 18” x 18” ink + oil paint on BFK Rives
PRIVATE COLLECTION

Whisper #9
Whispers Across Time… series, 2021
Monotype, 18” x 18”
Ink on BFK Rives

KELLEE MORGADO and I collaborated on an artist book with the Black Rock Press, DONT CUT YOUR HAIR IT’S BEAUTIFUL. My photography and an intaglio print KEEPSAKE, along with a little written piece is inside a very tricky and incredibly designed trio of books that interlock and open in a variety of ways. The artist book has been acquired by the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art. Find here a video by Yuka Petz, in Season Three, Artist’s Books UNSHELVED, an ongoing video series exploring selected pieces from the Cynthia Sears Artist’s Books Collection at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art.

I worked on a print exchange with the OPEN PRESS PROJECT… these guys are completely brilliant! You buy or print a tiny 3D printing press and make a printed image on paper 3 inches by 3 inches. It goes into a travelling exhibition through Europe and is published in a beautiful book. Super jazzed about how it came out!

And finally the Odd Girls were exhibited this year at the 52nd Annual Art Faculty Exhibition at Truckee Meadows Community College, NV, USA. Odd girls are stitch drawings - a related body of work created at the same time as the Whispers Across Time…. monotypes.

You can see all of the series here.

52nd Annual Art Faculty Exhibition at Truckee Meadows Community College, NV, USA, beautifully curated by Kyle Karrasch. Circular sculpture of cardboard by Kyle Karrasch, whose work considers recycling ethics and the waste we humans produce on a daily basis.

Installation view of Odd Girls cotton thread on British linen, at the 52nd Annual Art Faculty Exhibition at Truckee Meadows Community College, NV, USA

So all in all a fairly eventful year when looked at in hindsight…. (Surprised face)

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

WISHING YOU A FANTASTIC - FRESH - positive - ART FILLED and creative

2024

from

Frances Melhop

"Losing Touch" solo exhibition

After a gruesome summer of fires, evacuation, innumerable covid tests, and just a touch of stress.... it is my great pleasure to announce my solo show

Melhop Gallery º7077 from 22 Oct - 2 Nov, 2021

Closing reception is on the 30 Oct 4-6pm

come on by!!!!!!

invisible painting from Harvest, and a cast resin hand from Contact

installation view of Harvest and Contact at Losing Touch exhibition

Losing Touch consists of several bodies of work in various mediums exploring presence and absence in real and virtual spaces. It engages with tensions present in and between communication, self-hood and control. The project originates in recollections of the intensity of childhood sensory perception and the diminishment of that intensity as a result of the augmentation of those perceptions with photography, screens and virtual spaces. The promise and lure of these technologies of the self, attract more and more of our attention, time, and connection, to the detriment paradoxically of physical human interaction and material states such as sleep and self-care.

installation view of Harvest and Contact at Losing Touch exhibition

Detail of the installation view of Losing Touch, invisible paintings from Harvest and resin cast hands from Contact

New bodies of work in other mediums under the same umbrella theme include; whispers across time...(embroidery, monotypes and pen and ink drawings) and Timestable Girl, (video installation), both on view at the gallery.
The Exhibition Page will be updated regularly with more images and video of the show.

Timestable Girl

whispers across time...

Whisper 4, girl + bucket, 2021, cotton thread on British linen, 12.5” x 29”, Whisper 5, girl + bow, 2021, cotton thread on British linen, 12.5” x 29”, Whisper 6, girl + chair, 2021, 2021, cotton thread on British linen, 14” x 29

detail of Whisper 6, girl + chair, 2021, 2021, blind contour drawing in cotton thread on British linen, 14” x 29”

Losing Touch exhibition essay
by Teri Barnes

When is a line more than a line? When it connects us through time and space? When it becomes unrecognizable as a “line”? When it becomes just another blip on a screen? These are all possible answers in Frances Melhop’s exhibition Losing Touch at Melhop Gallery º7077.

Through multiple mediums we see how a line can transform into figures, transcend from social media and touching a screen, and tell time in an ephemeral way. Upon entering the gallery we encounter Harvest and Contact, two bodies of work that combine to tell the story of the screen–both virtually and dimensionally. The work in Harvest is made of multi-sized black paintings that have a texture of fingerprints and symbols, words, and emojis that represent the desired effects of living a social media life. We constantly seek approval from known and unknown people to make us feel important and validated. The black-on-black of these works make the viewer shift their angle to see the “language.” Melhop explains these as “the traces we leave both voluntarily and involuntarily throughout the world.”

Contact utilizes a series of hands in different positions related to how we use our phone screens. Melhop relates these hands as, “the gestures we make while using our phones and devices look more like caresses from our angle but from the point of view of the screen, they are confronting, aggressive types of gestures.” The sterile white of the hands adds to the coldness of this aggressive touch and the height of where the hands are mounted invade the viewer’s space as if they are about to touch us. The hands are all casts of Melhop’s own hand, making visible the literal work of “the artist’s hand” in the artwork. She says she thinks “about the human value of touch, and that working by hand, producing artifacts born of touch as a process, involves time and slow contemplation.” Both of these bodies of work speak to how involved we are in our screen and how we leave both visible and invisible marks behind. Melhop says, “the promise and lure of these technologies of the self, attract more and more of our attention, time, and connection, to the detriment paradoxically of physical human interaction and material states such as sleep and self-care.”

With Times Table Girl, two silk fabric pieces hang in front of a projection of a young girl (she is also printed on the silk) reciting her times tables for the viewer. The video is both sincere and vulnerable, with a stutter here and there as the numbers keep growing and growing. This work also speaks to the passage of time, making us think about learning in school and how the lessons of our past can so easily be forgotten.
Melhop’s newest work involves using blind contour drawings as inspiration and fuel to bring new life to her past use of tintype photographs of Victorian girls. Whispers Across Time… takes the images of the girls from those tintypes and re-envisions them as both embroidered, drawn, and mono printed forms. The embroidered figures have their own room in the gallery – stitched onto British linen, they are both fragile and ethereal. Using the blind contour method of drawing, Melhop abstracts the original figure making the young girl seem “old” yet still young at the same time. She says this effect seems to “unravel age.” By drawing with vanishing ink, Melhop had to work fast to complete the stitching which changes the contours of the drawings again in this intricate process. We can see traces of recognizable features through the abstractions – eyes here, distorted feet there. There is almost a Picasso-like twist to how the bodies form together. On its own is a stitching of Melhop’s own Father, a sweet gesture of family portraiture using this abstracted method.

Similar to these stitched works are another iteration of the blind contour figures in another room of the gallery. These works on paper take the inspiration from tintypes again – this time linking the subtle colors of the surface of the emulsion on metal as you shift the plate, to using muted colors of gouache paint as the backdrop for the figures. Melhop says by using these different methods of re-creating the Victorian girls from the tintypes, she is getting at the “essence” of the tintype girls. They are still related to photography – Melhop’s original art-making method, yet dig deeper into the meaning behind the “portrait” and how it was supposed to capture the soul of a person. In the hallway linking these two bodies of work are monotype prints with bright fuschia-colored dresses and blind contour figures embodying them. Melhop is thinking about the “Empty Dress”– how the style, iconography, and meaning behind this article of clothing can speak volumes. The backgrounds of the dresses and figures are multiple layers of color – mimicking the thin veil of silk from her previous pieces. This newest work comes from Melhop’s recent time spent at the “In Cahoots” Artist Residency. She says she is “loving drawing again, as well as printmaking and photography.” She is finding surprises in the new work she is making and is inspired by both artists represented by the gallery (the fiber works of Stewart Francis Easton and Karen Hampton) as well as local artists (the drawings of Wes Lee and prints by Nolan Preece).

All of these bodies of work create a conversation about the figure – both real and imagined, and how we reveal ourselves to the world. We knowingly and sometimes unknowingly allow ourselves to be framed in a certain light and are transformed by the responses we receive. The through line from self to civilization can be as simple as a fingerprint or as complicated as an abstracted drawing. Melhop brings all these lines together to tell a compelling story of the visual connections of past, present, and future and how we translate them.

Whisper portrait 2, 2021, 1/1 monotype print, ink on BFK Reeves, 18” x 18”

A fleeting visit to the exhibition “Losing Touch” by Frances Melhop

It is all very exciting seeing the exhibition installed with different bodies of work talking to each other !!!

Looking forward to seeing you at the gallery...

Frances



contact frances@melhopgallery.com for visits outside of the reception hours

odd

We live in bizarre times for sure... now that my Master of Fine Arts thesis is complete, I seem to be spending an inordinate amount of time disinfecting groceries and trying catch up with the outside world virtually through screens. It is all slightly ironic considering my thesis is about communication, self-hood and control, with a focus on how I am withdrawing attention from the virtual spaces and revisiting material art practices...

News is I’ve completed, degree is signed off on, and fingers crossed my thesis solo show will be in September 2020. There is one more teaching day then summer holidays... whatever that means.

Ive been making a lot of bread over the last 2 months - experimenting and trying to bake at altitude, it’s tricky. Hopefully this pandemic will breed new generations of survivalists with empathy and a certainty of how physically and virtually CONNECTED everyone on the planet is now...

Obscurations – 8” x 10” tintype self-portraits by Frances Melhop 2017-2020. Tintype self #16.

New Crop .... exhibition + essay

Here is some of my latest news, …

I have been invited by the Capital City Arts Initiative, with amazing sculptor Mark Combs to install a 2 person exhibition called New Crop, at the Courthouse Gallery in Carson City, Nevada. I’ve been drooling over this gallery for years, it is an unusual tower-like exhibition space with amazing diffuse natural lighting  in an even more unusual government building…the actual city courthouse. Mark has installed part of his MFA thesis work, Sic Transit Gloria Mundi, a series of metal bone sculptures of steel with felted wool, and I have installed some of the Vanish girls from my MFA Midway. Both Mark’s and my work explore similar themes - temporality, memory and impermanence, so the two bodies of work tend to talk to each other in a strange but good way. The essay for the show was written by Kris Vagner from Nevada arts site, Double Scoop. Kris always has a different angle on everything "art world"

The show is open through September, but If you didnt make it to the opening on Friday, here is the essay….

Impermanent Markers

Two artists traveled different paths to the territory of human temporality

Frances Melhop grew up reading time-honored stories—“the ones that aren’t the tidied up fairy tales,” she explained. Later, working as a fashion photographer, she shot spreads for magazines like Vogue Australia, Elle Portugal, and Marie Claire Italy and found that the narratives and aesthetics from The Chronicles of Narnia and the Brothers Grimm still guided her imagination. She met the fashion industry’s requirement to illustrate the clothing and models in a flattering light—but she met it a bit subversively, partially on her own terms. “I just wanted to create these characters that you could identify with,” Melhop said. “I had to have a storyboard. … I had to have subtlety, and I had to have some of the dark side of fairy tales.”

Her magazine images convey magical mixtures of made-up worlds—a cursed princess with an air of Sleeping Beauty; the nonsensical proportions of Alice in Wonderland; the occasional gothic flourish of a Tim Burton film; and wry, surrealist stylings like those of Magritte and Dalí.

Eventually, Melhop, now an MFA candidate at the University of Nevada, Reno, switched from making photos in a commercial realm to making them in an academic realm. She found different ways to use portraiture to raise questions about how and why people are represented in pictures, especially women and girls. How do we try to define ourselves—and others—when we make images? Which parts of our personae are likely to be represented during a given era? Which parts are allowed to be? Do we call the shots about how we will be seen, or are there larger systems at play?

To probe these questions from different vantage points, Melhop has made several groups of images, using technologies and trends from different eras. In a recent series, she looked at a current phenomenon—selfie culture. She made a grid of 25 rough-edged, postcard- sized canvas pieces, pinned, specimen-style, to a dark background. Each canvas contains an eye, nose or mouth, borrowed from a stranger’s Instagram feed.

For her current series, Vanish, Melhop found images of girls, teenaged and younger, from the 19th century. Each girl is in her Sunday best, pictured head to toe in the center of a frame, eyes fixed in an intense gaze.

The pictures come from tintypes that Melhop collected from junk shops. (In hindsight, she said, it may have been their dark fairytale undercurrents that first caught her eye.) A tintype is made by exposing a metal plate inside a camera for several minutes, hence the stiff poses—a subject had to hold perfectly still for the entire process. As always in Melhop’s work, the ramifications of whichever technology she’s using are important to consider: Tintypes, invented in 1863, were more affordable than earlier forms of photography, making them popular with middle-class families. Traveling portrait artists set up temporary tintype studios at fairs and carnivals. Before this development, girls appear in the photographic record much more infrequently—as if the pre-tintype world had been made up mostly of soldiers, miners, Abraham Lincolns, Edgar Allen Poes, Frederick Douglasses, and the occasional Emily Dickinson, bride, or grandma.

To make the works in Vanish, Melhop collected tintype portraits of girls over several years, digitized them, repaired any damage, and printed them close to life-sized on translucent sheets of silk organza. The silk hangs away from the wall, willowy and thin, catching even the slightest breeze. Each girl’s high-collared dress, Victorian boots and expressionless gaze situates her firmly in the past. Forgotten, even. Melhop said that almost none of the pictures she’d collected came with much identifying information, that she’d found them far from any family album they may have been part of, forever confined to anonymity.

For most girls’ pictures, an additional piece of silk hangs near it, this one with her image repeated in a ghostlike negative. While we already know that these Civil War-era girls are long gone, seeing them again in white and black instead of black and white somehow further accentuates their impermanence.

In a sense, Melhop explained, these wistful portraits are metaphors for the way memories work. “Memories get buried,” she said. “And they have different opacities all the way through, until they just finally kind of disintegrate.”

Melhop’s magazine images, selfie canvasses, and tintypes on fabric are all part of one lineage. “I’m kind of looking at both ends of the spectrum and trying to contextualize where we came from,” she said. If the arc of her career has been to examine the forces that dictate how we are seen in images, the Vanish series posits that the ways we are seen—as children, as adults, and long after we are gone—are perhaps further out of our control than we’d like to think. The effect of this realization can easily add up to a nebulous sense of universal uncertainty, a sense that all is fleeting.

Two color photographs from an earlier Comstock series, feature worn residences as portraits of Virginia City. Melhop captures the historical and lived-in shells of that community.

Frances Melhop, Triangle – A/P #1 The Comstock Portrait Project 2013 - 2017

Digital Photograph on Hahnemühle cotton rag, 2018

While Melhop’s career-long investigation of portraiture eventually led her to the subtheme of mortality, for sculptor Mark Combs, mortality was the starting point.

“It’s a big part of me being an artist,” he said.

He was accepted to art school at age 19 but deferred to pursue a career in the Air Force. “As a military medic, the things I saw were horrific,” he said. “I was young. I was 21 the first time I went to a war zone, 39 the last time I went to one.” After he retired from the Air Force, he had a job training people who respond to mass casualties such as hurricanes and bombings, then took a year off, then enrolled under the GI Bill at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he completed a BFA in art. This year, he completed his MFA from UNR.

Combs’ recent sculptures depict oversized human bones made of felted wool and polished steel.

Mark Combs, Ossuary, welded steel, needle-felted wool, vacuum seal bags, grommets, hardware, 2019

Each one is sealed in a plastic bag. The plastic bags hang in a grid. The entire presentation appears resolved and composed, but the artist’s path to such gleaming surfaces and orderly compositions was no straight, easy road.

Combs said that the transition from military life to student life was difficult in more ways than one. As a medic, he’d seen too many injuries and deaths to keep track of, and those experiences took their toll in the form of PTSD and depression, which followed him into his studies. As an art student, he wrestled with the contrast between a well- ordered military mindset and the more metaphorical outlook his professors expected. “The military trains you to be concise, precise, brief and exact,” Combs said. At first, he was frustrated that people couldn’t read in his work the messages that were, to him, so clear and straightforward. “It would upset me that people wouldn’t see what I was doing,” he said. The solution: “I tried just to mess with things and see how I could broaden the perspective to more general themes”

His current project is anchored tightly to a theme by its title alone, “Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.” It’s a Latin phrase that means, “Thus passes the glory of the world,” acknowledging head-on that everything and everyone will one day be gone. This phrase and its variations are used in many contexts, in many cultures. Notably, on Wikipedia, the phrase is just one link away from the page on “vanitas” paintings, photorealistic pictures in which artists placed symbols of mortality—usually a human skull—among earthly riches. Vanitas paintings began in the Renaissance and have been riffed on in every way imaginable, from serious to satyrical, ever since. For Combs’ part, he conjures them up subtly—omitting any symbols of wealth or indulgence that would have suggested the vain futility that was part of the

Renaissance version of the genre. (Combs is most certainly not running from—or glossing over—the truth. In his MFA exhibition, an app counted down the days until his projected death.)

As a viewer, you’ll know for sure that you’re in the territory of mortality, and you’ll also know that Combs will not be standing at the gate to hand you a map and a compass. But he has left enough references for a self-guided tour.

Most of his plastic bags contain a radius and ulna, the bones that make up the forearm, but there’s also the occasional ball joint, jaw, or semi-fictional bone. They are all ostensibly human, but detached and anonymous. The bags and their grid-shaped arrangement may well invite notions of scientific classification. The bones themselves could be easily read as a memorial. The materials they’re made of half-transcend and half obey their own physical laws—the wool has the softness and porousness you’d expect, but also, it’s in the improbable shape of a rod that holds its shape. The steel, which is curved or bulbous in the right places, hints at being more easily malleable than it really is. Combs put hours and hours into welding, hammering, and grinding it just so.

A few pieces even have embedded in them the occasional railroad spike, wrench, bolt or nut. “A lot of these actually all have their own individual hidden history, because they were once other things,” Combs said. “Now there’s a whole new meaning to it. Which is also a reference to humanity and how we evolve. We recreate ourselves, which is something I’ve done myself.” Combs includes two wall sculptures of battered and welded car parts. The new welds, more accents than repairs, bring refinement and design giving new life to the discards.

Kris Vagner Reno, Nevada. June 2019

Mark Combs, Bi-Lateral

recycled car fenders, welding rods - various sizes, 2017

This exhibition is supported by a lead donation from the Southwest Gas Corporation Foundation. The artists and CCAI thank the Foundation for its generous support of this project.

The Capital City Arts Initiative [CCAI] is funded in part by the John Ben Snow Memorial Trust, National Endowment for the Arts, Nevada Arts Council, John and Grace Nauman Foundation, Carson City Cultural Commission, Nevada Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities,

NV Energy Foundation, and U.S. Bank Foundation.

Frances Melhop and Mark Combs

Photo by Sophie Deming

Capital City Arts Initiative www.arts-initiative.org

Vanish

Since Ive been thinking about memory, portraiture, photography and impermanence, I wanted to make a 3 Dimensional kind of temporal experience…

The installation consists of life-size positive and negative photographic prints from appropriated, tintype images of 17 Victorian girls, on semi opaque silk organza. As you walk between the girls the displacement of air from your body moves and drifts the images as if they were breathing…

The tintype, invented in the mid 1800’s signifies an era when portraiture became more accessible, in the form of a cheap tin photograph.

Vanish opens 12-21 November at the Jot Travis Gallery, University of Nevada, Reno

Entrance to Vanish installation

Sum of the Parts

Beginning the install for the MFA Review show…

Sum of the Parts work consists of small canvas paintings of dissected parts of faces, from appropriated selfies of girls.

Exhibition opens Monday 29th October - 8 November, 2018.

Jot Travis Gallery

University of Nevada, Reno

Hours 12-4pm weekdays

Kiwis in LA exhibition

The annual Kiwis in LA exhibition kicked off on Saturday the 13th October at Santa Monica Art Studios, an amazing art space in a converted aircraft hangar… naturally I took my sheep for an outing….

So many Kiwis all in one place … it was brilliant! Major surprise re-connections with friends from high school and family babies kitted out with sheep t shirts. I am treasuring my Shaun the sheep present… and “he walks!!!”

Thousands of visitors to the reception, 10 New Zealand wineries kept the vino flowing all night, while the outstanding Tangaroa Fish Market, based in LA, had cheffed up some incredible green lipped mussels straight from the coastlines of Godzone.

It doesnt get any better than that!

Thank you so much to Keith and Steve for putting your hearts and souls into such a wonderful exhibition and ginormous get together of Kiwis living abroad!!!

So happy to have shared a space with the amazing ceramics artist Ed!

Nico rocking the Haka

Road Trip!!!

Sheep are off to LA!

Last coats of varnish and a bit of fresh air…

Heading for the Kiwis in LA Exhibition

hitting the road…

desert walks…

2 days later …here we are !

fresh new site ...

here we go....