Mellony Taper: All This Useless Beauty
New solo exhibition of work by Mellony Taper, winner of the THG Open 2025.
The exhibition explores female stories, inviting us to consider how inherited experience and repeating generational patterns have shaped women’s lives.
Taper’s interdisciplinary practice traverses the intersection of traditional and new media, and she creates multi-layered palimpsests—layer upon layer continually overwritten.
The works can be seen as real and imaginary objects and pictures, two- and three-dimensional, often blurring the line between both. They feature inherited objects and domestic relics, and items with a vague or lost provenance, chronicling fragments of history and hints of past lives. The works are incomplete records, imperfect navigations of the ever-shifting perceptions of memory, time and experience.
Taper has an increasing interest in how digital and lens-based works manifest themselves in the world. She challenges traditional boundaries of their material representation attempting to work outside any single ‘maker definition’. The works defy accepted definitions of photography, sculpture, drawing or moving image.
