Frances Melhop

 Timekeeper series

TIMEKEEPER NO, NO, NO

ARTIST STATEMENT

TIMEKEEPER STATEMENT by Frances Melhop

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.

I have been really excited about how each piece in this series develops its own story and its own energy. I think about the center of the spiral as the germination of life.... I have always been attracted to the spiral from its symbolic significance to a New Zealander with our unfurling fern frond, to the ocean waves I lived in in Sydney Australia, to the Fibonacci spiral’s importance in design and in the universe itself.

Sometimes I have a series of words or a statement in mind while I am working which gets assimilated into the piece in morse code, hidden but visible, or as breaks in the stitching that return on themselves and grow bigger and bigger like sonar waves expanding out from the origin point. One of the largest pieces was a tribute to an artist and dear friend for an exhibition here in Nevada. I was mapping his life and major events that shaped his artwork and his way of being. These things included his family house burning down, losing the love of his life, and one of his employees nearly losing a leg in an accident in his studio - I included some of the words he often used or that applied to his work.

The piece I made for the exhibition at CAMP gallery, (Some Days Are Better Than Others), is based on a general feeling of existential crisis and finding meaning in what we do in the limited time available. The slow process feeds back into my own interests in tactile art practice, how we experience the world and reversing out of the digital world and screens that draw us in and homogenize us.

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.