Pastoral and bucolic still life settings emerge from Melanie Parke's life. The artist reconstructs familiar interiors and filters them through the ideology of memory. Her subjects often center on flowers, birds, decorative objects, gardens and domestic settings with an intent in creating safe places for pleasure. Parke utilizes sentiment to craft a domestic locus and seek visual lushness by alternating tonal moods and vivid ornamentation.
Painting is a pleasure-seeking process and abstraction a vehicle with which to think and begin. Melanie Parke sets up the space intuitively, in broad and textured gestures, then pieces together arrangements to compose a homespun narrative. Specific interiors and landscapes are implied. Shifting the emphasis to pattern, texture and tone, she works to destabilize notions of exacting representation. This is an effort to build on a sensation of memory which conjures both comfort and longing.