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Margaret Mellis: Modernist Constructs

By Gemma Batchelor, 06.12.2021
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Margaret Mellis: Modernist Constructs, Towner Eastbourne. Installation View. Image courtesy Towner Eastbourne and Rob Harris.

Towner’s exhibition, the first institutional show in over a decade of work by Margaret Mellis (1914-2009), brings together works that illustrate a progression from early still lives, to late abstract constructions, the latter of which dominated the last twenty years of her career. The contrast of early and late is clever and playful, presenting a fascinating dialogue between works made throughout her life. Through this, what is strikingly clear is Mellis’ honouring of colour (perhaps drilled into her by a tutor, the Colourist Samuel J Peploe) and her careful placement of form – whether of painted objects or found material.

Mellis grew up in East Lothian and studied at Edinburgh College of Art before moving to London, where she studied at the Euston Road School, which prized representational painting based on observation. The influence of tutors at these schools, whether William Gillies in Edinburgh or Vanessa Bell in London, can be seen in her early stills lives and portraits, such as Untitled: Still Life with Black Banana, 1937, on show. The oil, alongside a vibrant self-portrait and other painterly still lives, makes for a beautifully unexpected start to the exhibition, when ‘abstract’ and ‘constructions’ are the instinctive associations with the artist’s oeuvre.

Margaret Mellis: Modernist Constructs, Towner Eastbourne. Installation View. Image courtesy Towner Eastbourne and Rob Harris.

Observational set ups quickly morph into experimentations in geometric collage. The subtle arrangements of line and colour signify a turning point in Mellis’ career, and indeed the history of modern British art. In 1939, conscious of impending war, Mellis and her then husband, the art critic Adrian Stokes, relocated to St Ives, Cornwall; Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham and others soon followed, enabling the formation of innovative and influential St Ives School. It was whilst living with Mellis and Stokes that Nicholson pressed Mellis to experiment with the technique of collage, a technique which soon completely engrossed her.

Mellis left St Ives in 1946, after the end of her marriage; it was a personally motivated (and needed) move that had unfortunate implications for her career. The early physical separation from St Ives allowed for an easy dismissal of her early experiments in collage and construction, which were in fact integral to the beginnings of the group, something that has yet to be fully recognised. Mellis’ art changed also, for a time, as she returned mostly to representational painting.

Margaret Mellis, Cloud Cuckoo Land, 1991. Image courtesy Towner Eastbourne and Rob Harris.

Over the next two decades she was pulled back to abstraction often, but it wasn’t until 1978 that she began to create the works synonymous with her career: driftwood constructions. These colourful structures form the main focal point of the exhibition and their amazing variety sings out. The sculptural assemblages hang on the wall, although their elements first suggested formations fit for artworks while stacked up in the corner of Mellis’ studio; her ‘wood pile’. The large fragments of driftwood were found whilst walking on the beach near her home in Suffolk, chosen for their interesting shape, colour and texture, perhaps with additional features or traces of text, remnants of their original use.

Each construction seems to have a different character, at first titled numerically but later with narrative and inventive names, encouraging further readings into what Mellis might have seen in their shapes. Cloud Cuckoo Land, 1991, and The Bogman, 1990, are particularly evocative. They at once appear modern and ancient, as if their age has been confused by the process that brought them into being: aged natural materials manipulated for human use, abandoned to the forces of nature before finally being picked up by the hands of an artist. In this way, they are imbued with time itself, the external forces enacted upon them just as integral to the work as their colour and form.

Margaret Mellis: Modernist Constructs is at Towner Eastbourne, until 30th January 2022.