Melissa Kime

Biography

Melissa Kime was born in Wiltshire UK in 1989 and currently lives and works in London. She graduated with a BA Fine Art in 2011 from Falmouth University, with a postgraduate diploma in drawing from the Royal Drawing School in 2013 and with an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2015. She exhibited in Bloomberg New contemporaries, 2014 at the ICA London which was selected by Enrico David, Goshka Macuga and Marvin Gaye Chetwynd and won the Arts Club award at The Royal Academy Summer Show, 2019. She has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad in both solo and group shows, she has won numerous prizes for both drawing and painting and her work is in many private collections as well has been written in articles for publications such as Unpolished magazine. 

My paintings are set to a Roman Catholic backdrop they are cloaked in Catholic Folklore and magick. The women in my work perform rituals centred upon healing, jinx removal or the prevention of bad things happening-fertility spells and protection but mostly, these women are trying to connect together and survive, through the linking of menstrual blood, plaited hair and autobiographical experiences. 

I try and weave my way through the memory and activity of wise women, women who were clever and ‘highly strung’, women who were healers or herbalists, people with inner knowledge and feminine secrets all who may easily be accused of witchcraft, an effective weapon with which to silence or disempower them. This was a highly dangerous activity and required the female to hide diary’s, notes recipes, even their bodies by stitching them into the layered folds of delicate needlework. This activity is mirrored within my  practice where I layer paint, symbols and memory in honour and camaraderie for those that have gone before me. Linking them through plaited hair, hand-holding, sisterhood, blood rites and self projections of myself superimposed within their stories. Time and space move aside and individualism fades whilst I highlight the ancestral lineage of all women through all that is woman and the wrongs that have been done to them.

See Paula’s Lockdown Interview here -

About this work

The works in this show focus on the folkloric traditions of the British Isles which I’m practically interested in. May-Day rituals take place around the sacred stones of Avebury a part of the world I grew up in. Here the sacrifices take place of a fertile virgin queen who is wrapped in ribbons bound for luck and hand fastened together with the rest of her sisters by the delicate unravelling of thread. Birds hop in and out of the pieces - two crows for luck and the stones become shape shifters, tricksters a bit like Puck from a Midsummer’s Night dream appearing and disappearing into their stone forms. Maybe the women in these paintings  have actually been turned into the stones?