Frances Melhop

 Timekeeper series

TIMEKEEPER NO, NO, NO

ARTIST STATEMENT

The spiral has always carried a quiet power for me — a form both ancient and alive. From the unfurling koru of native ferns in Aotearoa New Zealand to the curling surf of Pacific waves and the elegant precision of the Fibonacci curve, the spiral threads through my imagination as a symbol of energy, time, and renewal. In my work, it becomes a record — a living track of history unfolding.

I draw with thread. Each stitch is a line, animated and dimensional, casting small shadows that shift as the light moves. The stitched surface hovers between disciplines — painting, drawing, embroidery, soft sculpture — never quite one or the other, but something in between.

Timekeeper #NO NO NO encodes fragments of artist Galen Brown’s history. The Morse code woven into the spiral translates his obsessive repetition of the word “NO,” written thousands of times after his parents’ home burned down in the late 1980s. 

Brown’s immense pencil-drawn circles — born from another moment of trauma, a terrible accident with an adze in his framing workshop — circle after concentric circle moving outward as meditations on how to remain calm, the energy radiating like rings in a tree.

In Timekeeper #NO NO NO, the spiral becomes both a tribute and a conversation — an echo of Brown’s influence that continues to move through my own practice. The piece nods to his early paintings made with rust gathered from the Golden Gate Bridge, folding material, memory, and place into pigment. Through thread and code, the work traces the resonance of his life — mapping grief, renewal, and the rhythm and pulse of time itself.

Visible Mending

stories, stitches, tears, and repairs

Visible Mending exhibition is a selection of embroidered drawings from 3 separate but connected bodies of work by Frances Melhop: Timepieces, 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.