I'm a visual artist, working across painting, textiles and installation. My creative process is heavily influenced by observation, portraiture, and abstraction, with a fondness for painting with watercolours. I also like experimenting with digital collages, blending visual elements from previous works to create new pieces featuring unique images, textures, and concepts.

While I enjoy working with various mediums, traditional painting is my preferred method for expressing sensitive, personal, and political experiences. Delicate and tactile components characterise my art, often presented on a large scale. I use subtle colours and recurring imagery to explore themes related to the body and how I make and paint configurations that appear, disappear, and regenerate. The interplay of materials and textures has always been a great source of inspiration for me.

Since 2015, I have been focused on making textile works surrounding the subject of the body that are presented as fragments, hints, and subconscious connections. I’m deeply inspired by various female artists across art history who work with themes and politics surrounding the body and embodied experiences. One prominent figure who has significantly shaped and informed my interest towards subject matter and focus on form and material is artist Louise Bourgeois. I first encountered her artworks in the flesh in 2015, which amplified my desire to work with textiles and address the figures hidden across my works. Observing her works up close, the tactile and emotional response informs many areas of my art practice and approaches towards working with textile material.

I had my first solo exhibition, Flux, at Seventh Gallery in Melbourne. My exhibition included various sculptural pieces that were tactile in nature. My installation focused on form and the theme of nature using synthetic materials. I was drawn to discarded items and collected them in monochromatic black to showcase the soft shapes and forms. The focus was on an overgrown landscape and the political implications of waste and excess. I also explored the relationship between the human hand and material through traditional needlecraft techniques.

During my honour’s year in visual art, I delved into the relationship between materials. I created various works using digital and traditional methods, focusing on textiles and painting. My approach involved painting abstract imagery using watercolours, relying on intuitive and mark-making techniques. I then printed my works onto textile fabrics and transformed them into soft sculptural and installation-based pieces. Throughout the process, I explored the concept of dematerialisation in art and embodied experiences of identity while experimenting with digital and traditional approaches. I created a large, site-specific installation featuring hand-sewn and machine-made textile hangings for my graduate exhibition.

After having my first child, I started reflecting on my experiences and how I viewed the body. This led me to become interested in the historical representations of women's stories and their embodiment and subjectivity. My solo exhibition, A Trail of Seams, explored this interest in material relationships at Assembly Point in Melbourne. The exhibition focused on household fabrics and their connection to domestic space. I displayed large tactile hangings across five large glass vitrines filled with collected and salvaged textiles to create an illusion of a never-ending trail of fabrics. As my art practice evolved, I stopped digitally printing onto textile fabrics and started painting with watercolour directly onto the textile surface of each hanging. This large body of work played with light, space, colour, and pattern, highlighting fragmenting, rearranging, and repurposing.

As a mother, artist, and arts educator, I rediscovered my passion for figure drawing. Concentrating on the figurative elements in my art practice and my fascination with self-portraits, I slowed down my process, meticulously building colour and transparency with watercolour. The complexity and depth of the colours with watercolour never cease to amaze me. While I paused working with textiles, I shifted my focus to imagery that conveyed fragility and precarious structures, featuring dissected limbs and fragmented arrangements. Exploring the theme of metamorphosis and contemplating a complete change of physical form as a new mother inspired my first large self-portrait painted in watercolour. I created a self-portrait titled "Roller Coaster" in 2022, which depicts the intense experience of motherhood. My inspiration came from breastfeeding, domestic life, and the challenges of being a mother. I exaggerated the limbs to resemble bulging breasts on the verge of bursting. I aimed to capture the idea of melting, saggy skin, and the feeling of falling. This artwork was chosen as a semi-finalist for the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize.

I love painting figures and self-portraits. I frequently attend art workshops in Melbourne to enhance my skills and extend my knowledge of the human form. I'm also exploring digital collages as a process to recycle and reconfigure imagery from my painted works. By repeating shapes, playing with textures, fragmenting, overlapping, and randomly arranging images, I create new works with unique textures and shapes. I'm inspired by the interplay of materials and textures and how they come together to form new works.

At Rubicon Ari in Melbourne, Tender Buds, my solo exhibition, continued my interest in fragmenting and rearranging to create large-scale works across textiles and fabric. I made a collection of abstract pieces inspired by my digital collages. These included wall-based textile pieces and works painted on cotton rag paper, displayed together in the same area. My main focus was on the towering formations that I painted and created, which were meant to represent the idea of forms and structures without a clear beginning or end. I used a variety of shapes and disorderly forms to make towering, bulbous arrangements that conveyed complex and ambiguous meanings.

Mel Jane Wilson pays respect to the Wadawurrung people and their elders past and present – the traditional custodians of the land on which she lives and makes art.

Mel Jane Wilson (b.1989 Naarm/ Melbourne) lives in Ballarat, Wadawurrung county. Her solo exhibitions include Rubicon Ari, Assembly Point, Melbourne; Mailbox Art Space, Melbourne; Seventh Gallery, Melbourne; Rooftop Art Space, Melbourne. She has participated in group exhibitions at The Art Room, Blacktown Arts Centre, NSW; Monash Gallery of Art; Unicorn Lane, Ballarat; Backspace Gallery/The Art Gallery of Ballarat; The Artists Guild, Melbourne; Red Gallery, Melbourne; Floating Goose Gallery, Adelaide; Montsalvat Gallery; Alderman Upstairs, Melbourne; Craft Victoria Gallery; McClelland Gallery; Sidney Myer Gallery.

She was recently a semi-finalist (2022) in the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) with honours from the Victorian College of the Arts.

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