Melanie Counsell has built a considerable reputation over almost twenty years for her installations and sculptural interventions. Notable for her economy of means and material sophistication Counsell has created numerous critically celebrated installations in gallery environments and disused buildings that created new psychological environments through intense manipulation of time and space, architecture and object.
Simon Morrissey
Independent Curator and Director of Works|Projects

Recent Solo Exhibitions:
Lutecia Works|Projects, Bristol 2011
http://www.worksprojects.co.uk/exhibitions/lutecia/
Reviewed: Art Monthly No.345 April 2011

Recent Group Exhibitions:
Récits Anamorphiques, Frac des Pays de la Loire, France 2011 
http://www.fracdespaysdelaloire.com/?programmation/au-frac/recits-anamorphiques.html

The Chrystal Palace (Destroyed), Works|Projects, Bristol 2011
http://www.worksprojects.co.uk/exhibitions/the-crystal-palace-destroyed/

Melanie Counsell is represented by Works|Projects, Bristol.
http://www.worksprojects.co.uk/

BODY (My Body).
SPACE (Indoors and Outdoors).
SCULPTURE (In the Room).
FILM (Time Passed).
AUDIENCE (You and me).

My fundamental understanding of the world is by the means of my body. 

All is subject to the momentary, daily, weekly momentum and monotony – changes inmood, colour, optimism, circumstances, and opportunities and desires. The narrative is the day to day.

Poetry offers the most preferable comparison or alignment - I have a feeling but I cannot see what it is.
Outdoors - (out there) - alignment or alienation.
All of these conditions that ‘play out’, on the axis of time, space and place.

In-doors - spaces: galleries, rooms. Viewing areas, given or chosen, disused or derelict. Like the outdoors, the conditions are never the same.
Film - 16mm, super 8, moving image. Time and space compressed, flattened onto a reel. 100 feet of ‘passed’.
Exhibitions are generally temporary, ephemeral. They go up and come down.

(Notes/extracts from a longer text)
It is set against these values that I make sculpture. In broad terms my work is engaged with space - how work inhabits or can ‘alter’ the space. Many of the works have been site-generated or site-specific, often attempting to bring a heightened awareness of both time and place.Space, architecture, landscape and the body have all had an influence on my work. These are massive terms and categories and my relationship to them conceptually is introspective, emotional and intimate. My professional practice spans almost 20 years – listed below are a few selected exhibitions over this time.

Coronet Cinema, Mile End, London, organised by Artangel 1993
www.artangel.org.uk/projects/1993/coronet_cinema



Matt’s Gallery, London 1995
www.mattsgallery.org/artists/counsell/exhibition-2.php

Lutecia, Works|Projects, Bristol 2011
www.worksprojects.co.uk/exhibitions/lutecia/

Part-Time Lecturer in Undergraduate Sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art
External Examiner for Undergraduate Sculpture, Edinburgh College of Art

My teaching career started in France in 1993 at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Lyon and Ecole de Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux. Over the years I have visited many of the U.K’s art schools and colleges as well as visiting several European schools, for example: Oslo, Karlsruhe and Maastricht.

My approach and engagement is towards an experimental, developmental and diverse teaching of sculpture, within the academic framework of the Undergraduate Fine Art Course and Sculpture Area. This is mainly manifested and directed through the 1 to 1 tutorial system, through seminars, and critiques and workshops. I am part of a teaching team continually responding to the rapidly changing interests and preoccupations of 18 to 24 year old students and rapidly changing technologies, media and trends in making and disseminating.