14" square, hand-painted ceramic platter created by artist Melinda Hackett.

We are happy to welcome Melinda Hackett to All Against Abuse for the first time.

Melinda is a New York and Southampton based painter and printmaker. Her work references the natural world as seen through her mind's eye and is meant to be experienced as a visual playground rather than taken literally.

Her forms float in, out and around the surface sometimes diving in and out of the picture plane. They can be seen as intimate views through a microscope or cosmic views through a telescope.

In addition to oil, she works in watercolor, pencil, inc and recently egg tempera. As the collaboration MDMH she works with the sculptor Michael Drury to render her forms in bronze, wood, and concrete.

View her website here.

About Melinda

My paintings refer to organic space and unfixed time. To call them landscapes would be misleading since they are poetic inventions of my 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. My paintings represent both states, the near, the far, the view through a telescope, the view through a microscope, the sheltering sky, the intimate forest. My 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. My paintings represent states of nonlinear 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.