The 2015 Christine Risley Award winner

Melinda Lauw, BA (Hons) Fine Art and History of Art graduate

The 2015 Christine Risley Award has been awarded to BA (Hons) Fine Art and History of Art graduate Melinda Lauw. The judging panel was drawn to her in depth engagement with the physical and psychological nature of materiality through process of tufting and were impressed by Lauw’s commitment to perfecting a technique and creating a very ambitious set of works.

Melinda Lauw is interested in haptic perception and her works responds to the powerful sensations that can be experienced through materiality. She trawls the internet for textual, visual and auditory stimuli and accounts of strong physical or physcological reactions to the material. It is apt that she chooses the technique of hand tufting to explore her own experience of trypophobia, the fear of clusters of holes.

The process involves shooting yarn through a loose weave ground fabric, gradually filling the spaces in the structure of the fabric to build up the carpeted surface. Through the almost obsessively repeated clusters of cell or spore like motifs, the works spread across the wall or settle inside inviting bowl shaped structures.