Melissa Evans-Pearce - BA (Hons) Fine Art
Melissa’s practice explores the fragile terrain of memory, loss, and the haunting residues of the past. Working across cyanotype printing, painting, found photography, and film projection, they engage with the ways images fragment over time, how they fade, distort, and resist full comprehension. Rooted in hauntological theory and the aesthetic of old film, their work evokes the eerie tension between presence and absence, familiarity and estrangement.
Using found family photographs as a starting point, Melissa examines the emotional power of anonymous figures and half-remembered moments. Cyanotypes become spectral impressions, blueprints of memory, while painting offers a space for reimagining, erasing, and amplifying selected details. Faces are often blurred or blocked out; colour palettes draw from the deep blues of early photography and the burnt oranges of outdated film stock. These choices serve to distance the image from reality while drawing attention to its emotional core.
Their practice invites viewers into a quiet, unsettling space which is shaped by nostalgia, uncertainty, and the uncanny. Through abstraction and visual reduction, Melissa reflects on the way memory withholds and reveals, and how the act of remembering can be as ghostly as the image itself.
