Artwork by Melinda Hackett

Rosewood, 2009,

oil on wood panel

6.5 x 6.5 inches

About the artist:

Hackett’s paintings refer to organic space and unfixed time. To call them landscapes would be misleading since they are poetic inventions of her imagination, and reference the world of nature rather than depict it literally. One of my purposes in making paintings is to transport the viewer to a necessarily foreign place, where nature can be experienced without knowing it fully, and where reality is communicated through the senses. I am involved in the play of interior and exterior space. On one hand; interior, intimate, house, personal-and on the other; exterior, immense, universe, cosmos. Hackett’s paintings represent both states, the near, the far, the view through a telescope, the view through a microscope, the sheltering sky, the intimate forest. Her paintings create worlds full of images that float, hover, creep, spin, hang, roll or sleep in corners.

The images come from an internal source. They contain a vital impulse, and are alive as if subjected to breezes, weather and climatic conditions. Hackett’s paintings represent states of non linear time. It is less that a singular event is taking place than that a group of different objects are moving through the picture plane at various rates of speed and in opposite directions, some gliding slowly and others whirring as if in a blender. Nature is not in a state of decay, nor is it symbolic or nostalgic for the past. The paintings are largely fragmentary in that they exist in one moment of time, so do they exist in one torn swatch of space. There is a sense that the activity continues outside the borders of the paintings as the forms flirt with the edges or get chopped off by them. Some forms are only just coming into being while others have already 'come out' and some just like to watch. By virtue of their inability to be fully identified, they remain in the realm of the poetic, a sum of images to form a whole. They are meant to be experienced fully through the eye of the viewer.