Melanie Wheeler
Melanie Wheeler relocated to Margate to join Open School East and has spent the year pursuing and expanding her interests in alternative forms of curation, events and research based practice. Throughout the year Melanie has worked on a number of projects, through which new methods have been introduced and have become key to her practice, in particular fiction writing, sound and installation. One instance of this was her collaboration with fellow Associate Coral Brookes to organise the series of workshops Sleepwalks, which explored the varied manifestations of fiction as an analytical tool, giving perspective on contemporary society, art practice and visual culture.
These themes intersect with ideas raised in Melanie’s practice and have been further examined through projects during the year including work produced for Guest Projects, Whitstable Biennale and LIMBO. Within these projects attention is recurrently drawn to language, narrative, metaphysics and socially encoded values. For Gut Feelings, Melanie explored diversification of industry, fictional commodities, geological time and slippages in reality by conducting a research project focused on a deep underground science lab in her hometown in North Yorkshire. In this work, she used Dark Matter as a tool to think about a future that is sliding towards us and possible realities that may exist beneath the present.