Melissa J Harvey

I am drawn to and affected by undulating textural elements I experience while walking the streets of my local area in Marrickville, Sydney. When I traverse the cityscape, I photograph and mentally absorb surfaces for future reference in my studio. Textures of hard mottled concrete, brick and bitumen surfaces sprayed with paint by graffiti artists, council and construction workers hold my attention. ‘Street Pulp’ is inspired by reflective light on a graffiti sprayed brick wall surface, discovered after a rainfall. These vivid over-sprays and splatters are immersive and visually resemble the soft textural layering of sprayed cotton pulp and water that create the surface depth of my artwork.

The Silent Pool exhibition is an exploration in connection to place - uniting geographical histories; textural experiences and the processes within my art practice.

Running alongside my homeland is a plunging waterfall within the Bagul Waajaarr Nature Reserve and on the land of the Gumbaynggirr people. The Silent Pool, a geological mystery where the river goes underground via a fault line and returns under a large pool. The memories I have residing in this landscape, and the textures of this environment continue to influence my life and my art Practice.

Each work is H.42 xW.27cm

In 2023 I was a guest artist in the Print Department at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. Taking inspiration from my immediate surroundings in the studio and outside along the vast Maiwar River. I captured and recalled reflections of light on water, surface textures, and design elements such as covers on water drains. The imagery involved in the making process was visually immersive and at times surreal. The result was

‘Out to see (sea)’ a series of pulp prints made from surplus years old university t-shirts, black, red and white.

I used every day industrial items from the papermaking studio, to impress, stencil and spray cotton pulp to achieve a three-dimensional photographic like image.

My practice is informed by an acute awareness for the global crisis of disposable fashion and its environmental and social impacts.

I work predominantly in a medium that I produce from pre used clothing and domestic cloth donated by my community.

These articles hold stories and traces of their past owners embedded in the fibres. While bringing my own experiences, I acknowledge all these stories and combine them in a retelling through pulp prints that are meticulously layered and delicately sprayed textural wonderlands.

A floral wallpaper, geometric lino, a paisley shirt are all reoccurring patterns from my childhood. Shredding fabric, tracing imagery, spraying pulp, and the sensuous delights of handmade paper are reoccurring through out my practice. Together they conceptually speak of my social and cultural history, and facilitate the exploration of my identity.

I have chosen material fabric as my medium so as to establish a means to examine the clothes and other structural manifestations of my domestic spaces. These spaces are personal and are enclosed by the sensual and mnemonic experience of daily life.

Dark Matter series is inspired by the re activity of rough materials against painted mottled concrete, brick and bitumen surfaces that I experience as I traverse the urban landscape here in the inner west. Reflections of sunlight and the sparkling effect of night-lights on water are immersive. These 5 large scale pulp paper works are made from recycled cotton clothing and domestic cloth.

Reusing and repurposing cloth started early for me on a large remote dairy farm in Australia. From this isolation came resourcefulness. Repurposing and repetitious labour was a part of everyday life. I hold memories of my mother repurposing her old clothes to make new clothes for me, and patterns of domestic fabrics and interiors.

Unravel, Untold is an unfolding of family secrets through an exploration of my Nan’s tablecloth, heirloom passed onto me. Never used, crisp linen, vibrant in colour, bold mofit, folded in the cupboard for generations.

The textured medium I work with is made from reused clothes and domestic cotton fabric. These articles contain traces of their past owners, embedded in the fibres. I acknowledge that history even when the fabric pieces are subsequently transformed in a Hollander milling machine, reduced to a fine pulp. All traces of their previous form are anchored in the tiny particles suspended in water.

Untitled was a live work created at Sydney College of the Arts as part of my Masters work. This work took the duration of 4 days. I spray finely pulped cloth fibres suspended in water through a modified funnel (Hopper spray gun). I invite the viewer to engage directly with the architecture of the interior space through the pulp spray, which is applied onto the structural surfaces. As it is installed the pulp drips and floats off the gallery walls. As with any daydream, this work is fleeting. It lingers for the duration of the exhibition and is then washed away.

I grew up on a remote dairy farm with long green pastures, rolling hills and Sclerophyll rainforest on Gumbaynggirr country, an experience that continues to inform my life and art practice. Sights, sounds, smells and textures I encounter daily resonate and rekindle memories. A sense of place is at the heart of my studio practice and processes. The textural residue of surfaces and spaces I inhabit and explore evokes this connection to place. Rabbit Hill is a part of this property a long rolling hill with many rabbits and their homes. Named by my family, as to be an important landmark used to navigate the days farming activities. For instance, “move the electric fence on Rabbit Hill” or “the diary cows need to return tonight to the paddock left of Rabbit Hill”. For me - it was place of contemplation and a sense of freedom, riding my agricultural motorbike navigating across rocky hills and barb wired fences to get to this long green hill. I solved many of my life troubles as an isolated teenager there. I recently had a fever dream during my third dose of Pfizer that returned me to the memory of Rabbit Hill. I was floating over this landscape; feeling the wind and the grass contours of the rabbit holes in the earth, the energy of the land and the connection to my memories. I am conscious of trying to recreate these memories and a sense of belonging in my practice through the somewhat disjunctive combination of fabric (fibre) and hard surfaces. The evocative is often drawn from the most incidental of actions. Carrying heavy buckets of pulped cotton fibre recalls the daily chore of fetching buckets of fresh milk from the dairy. Spraying the fibre pulp onto walls echoes the act of hosing out the dairy. Nothing was ever discarded in my family home if it could possibly be repurposed. Recycling, reusing and altering original form gave objects a longer, more useful life and was a praised and valued skill. It is this practice that I reinforce in the medium of my work – recycled cotton clothing and domestic cloth. This show is a start and a deepening of these experiences on Rabbit Hill. An unpacking of memories with more to come.

This body of work is an experimental, site-specific installation that explores new ways in which the medium of fiber-pulp can be manipulated across varying surfaces and structures to create open-ended meanings.

In this work, the materiality of physical, auditory and visual geographies is encountered and assembled through haptic experience. These encounters are translated and embodied through the activity of making, involving the transformation of materials through repetitious acts into abstracted surfaces.  These surfaces are haunted by the memory of concrete terrains traversed on a daily basis, from an urban realm to the rural landscapes of my past.

The first installation I created for my research project was an external wall at Sydney College of the Arts titled Mini Wall (2015). I began this installation with no preconceived plan. The only prescribed elements were the medium and time frame. This installation was carried out over a period of three weeks. Each day I applied a different layer of pulp spray. The wall had many, varying shadows cast onto it from the surrounding buildings within the SCA campus which became my source for inspiration.

Pulped is a process- driven work which examines the complexities of abstraction and representation through the use of techniques, processes, images, and language drawn from vernacular cultural and prosaic experience.
Using pulped, cotton fabrics from old cloths, ‘Pulped’ is a drawing sprayed in layers directly onto the walls of Marrickville Garage.

The narrative that occurs between the reflective nature of the hard mottled surface of the walls, and the contrasting abstract shapes and urgent colours of the soft material, explores the material history of urban life in the inner west.

The title of Melissa J Harvey’s exhibition series at Our Neon Foe gallery, Possibilities, is an apt one.

The series will rotate through four installations over the course of a month and in the first rotation, each piece brings up myriad associations.

Large pressed fibre sheets zigzag down the wall and invite the eye to play with interpretations. From one side: industrial metal unfolding in rust and decay. From another: pristine slices of seabed; sandy ridges under clear water, caught between sunlight and shadow.

Pinned on the walls, tiny white squiggles map intricate neighbourhoods around deep black squares, with distinct suburbs marked out in shimmering gold. The first impression is that of looking down on a lit-up city through a plane window, the second is to suddenly be lost in a delicate, magnified tracery of leaf veins.

The works appear on these scales, either miniscule or vastly distant, but the process of creation connects them on a very human level. Harvey uses discarded clothing and domestic textiles to make the works, shredding and snipping old cotton fabrics into small squares, removing fastenings and fittings along the way. The fabric scraps are then fed into a Hollander milling machine, beating down the fibres into a pulp that can be pressed into thickly textured, paperlike sheets, or sprayed like render from a hopper spray gun.

A set of images from the exhibition captures moments from this part of the artmaking: photographic prints of a bubbling monochrome bath where the fabric is washed of residual dyes and detergents. Harvey’s addition of glinting gold-leafed beads rising up from the boiling mass could be artificial elements being separated away from the pure cotton, or might represent the richness that emerges, through art, from refuse.

Another photographic print from the set appears to be a giant lone tree in silhouette against the aurora borealis. This luminous, wheeling sky is revealed as a blurred instant from the same fabric wash; the tree as a single bush leaf stripped back to its fragile architecture.

The whole collection is alive with textured surface and layers of detail – a supremely satisfying juxtaposition of metallic gold with rough natural fibres, and geometric shapes that interrupt organic lines. The urban/rural tension is strongly present, with works that could equally evoke the speckle-spray of city graffiti, or the spatter of rain on a corrugated roof.

As this is only the first in the four-part series, the following installations will no doubt bring further possibilities for the viewer. These works hold potent and haunting space, like maps of galaxies, or the shapes that drift behind your eyelids when you hold your face to the sun.

Written by Holly Bennett

Travelling foreign skies, walking the streets of Sydney, immersed in local bush land, taking in moments of texture, shadow and light glimpses of what could be…… absorbing the feel of the moment in this trancelike dreamscape, these are serendipitous engagements with my surroundings moments of possibilities…

I interpret these moments through fabric textures, made with reused domestic cloth, found items from bush land, trimmed with tracings of ink, pencil, leather and gold leaf.

This exhibition brings together all my creative obsessions, forming a juxtaposition of textural indulgence, colour and written text all woven together to form “Letters from the Road”.

The inspiration for this series started with imagery taken from my journeys abroad and continued in my everyday travels to and from my studio in the inner west of Sydney. I am intrigued by the grittiness of sign’s at construction sites, markings on roads and the contrasting reflectivity of rough materials against painted surfaces. My road and train journeys and the text I was reading at the time are all threads that link the imagery you see in this series.

My work is created using cotton pulp as the paint/print medium. The fine pulp is made from recycled clothing that already has a story woven within its fibres, its own store of memories, and by spraying the pulp upon a silkscreen, it creates the texture and feel of my travels.

Queer Forest Creatures

A collaboration between myself and Charm Watts. This occurred during Gunyah Artist Residence Program.

'Gunyah' means resting place or place of shelter in the Gathang language of the Worimi people in the North Arm Cove area, and the term also features in a number of other Indigenous languages in NSW.

Every morning we would take a walk into the surrounding forest collecting pieces and objects, and taking photos of textures while discussing our ideas.

The creatures are inspired by the seasonal changes and unexpected acts of Mother Nature the bush land can offer. Moments of splendor, gems that can open your heart with great wonder. These moments of magnificence that we both experienced recently on a residency are represented here through sculptural spiritual begins, expressing there beauty through multi mediums; collected, found, made and gifted.