Timekeeper’s Garden

solo exhibition by Frances Melhop

at the RENO TAHOE INTERNATIONAL ART FAIR

11-14 September 2025

BOOTH

Dreaming a Life, 24” x 24” oil paint on linen, with hand embroidery, on stretcher, 2025

Many thanks to the Nevada Arts Council and Reno Tahoe International Art Fair for awarding a booth for a solo exhibition to Frances Melhop this year!

TIMEKEEPER Artist Statement

The Timekeeper series hovers between embroidery, painting, drawing, and soft sculpture—each one a spiral quietly tracing time and memory. The spiral becomes a visual mantra, embodying the existential dilemma and delight of living within unstoppable time: its relentless forward motion, its circling returns, and our deeply human impulse to mark its passage.

Stitch by stitch, the spiral grows outward from a central origin, echoing the cyclical nature of life and the quiet energy spirals produce. Like the rings in a tree trunk, each line of stitching maps time, emotion, and experience—capturing heartbreaks, joys, injuries, revisited again and again as the stitch line returns on itself while persistently moving forward. The humanness of each sometimes-wonky stitch is intentional, a mark of presence and vulnerability. They are records of lived time.

Gardens of layered oil paint lie beneath the embroidered stitches on the linen substrate, while hidden Morse code messages whisper from within the stitches—emitting secret transmissions, an archive of invisible information embedded in the work. These messages are not always meant to be decoded, but rather felt, like a pulse or breath.

With each Timekeeper, I focus on the journey of the stitch, the act of marking time, the intimacy of repetition. What may appear futile becomes, instead, a meditation, where imperfection and process animate each spiral, giving it an energy of its own.