‘This Is Where We Live’
Melissa Kime
15th of February - 9rd of March
In this new body of paintings, Melissa gives expression to a lifetime immersed in myth and folklore. Like a quilt maker, she patchworks tales from around her childhood home in Wiltshire alongside personal urban mythologies as inspired by elements of her locality in Saint Pauls Churchyard, Deptford where she now lives. Kime’s paintings offer glimpses into worlds suffused with magic and fantastical characters of which our own day-to-day experiences seem only to be flickering instantiations. ‘This is where we live’ is a portal to a seldom seen urban universes, inhabited by chimerical creatures and shapeshifting sprites.
Kime says of her works that they, “document the change of seasons, the things that I have noticed or recorded in my diaries. Like the way the leaves gently blow the lime tree leaves up at a certain angle or the way the first buds on the branches start to unfurl, the smell of mulch, dead leaves and walnut shells as you walk through the undergrowth and the sound of the crunch they make underfoot.” ‘This is where we live’ offers a birdseye view onto Melissa’s creative practice, displaying preliminary sketches and large, immersive paintings. They are enchanting in their vivacity, through which nature is regarded not as a static phenomenon but rather something alive and shapeshifting. The movement and whispering of the wind is audible from the swirling of leaves in ‘When Autumn Comes to the Graveyard’; the painful ice cold of the winter months felt in the piercing blue palette of ‘Selling Her Soul to the Devil;’ the nutty smell and taste of autumnal vegetables felt in the nose and on the tongue by the tertiary palette of her still lives.
The title of the exhibition points towards Melissa’s focus on the local as well as referring to previous artistic traditions which have charted the natural changes of the land, namely the folk art traditions of Europe and America. A point of continual inspiration for Melissa is Polish folk art, especially its emphasis on local community and its role in the ritual calendar. Medieval ‘labours of the months’ are also recalled, both formally and conceptually in the categorised depiction of the seasons and the human activity they command. Just as Melissa’s body of works feel cyclical in their observation of nature, the labour of the months were secular visual cycles often found in manuscripts, which depicted the different labours performed on the land according to season. July for example, showed the cutting and gathering of hay; August, the corn being reaped; September, harrowing and sowing’ October, curing grapes and making wine, and so on. Crucially, these images showed the actives of ordinary folk rather than the heroics or exclusive pursuits of the nobility.
Drawing on these folk visual traditions as well as British myth and folklore, Kime’s paintings steer a path between the prosaic and parochial towards the enchanted, poetic and incantatory. Much like Max Porter’s character Lanny, the creatures of the graveyard absorb both Melissa and the viewer into their world. Melissa creates spaces where time condenses and traces of our childhood pasts linger like ghosts. Her paintings become stage sets for the drama of the lifecycle, spanning from the naiveté and imagination of childhood to the beguiling adulthood that ultimately steals us all.
‘Then Dead Papa Toothwort leaves his spot and wanders off, chuckling, jangling in his various skins, wearing a tarpaulin gloaming coat, drunk on the village, ripe with feeling, tingling with thoughts of how one thing leads to another again and again, time and again, with no such thing as an ending.’ (Max Porter, ‘Lanny’)
