Reception: 31 May 1 pm - 7 pm
749-4 Honide, Arao
Kumamoto 864-0012
Japan
09054898302
Visible Mending
stories, stitches, tears, and repairs
Visible Mending exhibition is a selection of embroidered drawings from 3 separate but connected bodies of work: Timekeeper, Common Threads and Mourning Piece by Frances Melhop. Each work meditates on human imperfection, temporality, and memory through the repetitive, embodied gesture of stitching—a practice that evokes the unconscious rhythms of care, loss, and repair.
Origin, 2025
Oil paint on linen cotton thread, 12” x 12” x 3” on stretcher + maple frame
TIMEKEEPER
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.
Becoming Aware, 2025
Oil paint on linen cotton thread, 8” x 8” x 3” on stretcher
Frances Melhop
Artist Statement
Human touch, the traces we leave behind, and the interplay between presence and absence—both in physical and virtual spaces—are recurring themes throughout my work. I reflect on how sensory interactions have shifted in the age of photography, screens, and digital platforms, which increasingly demand our attention, time, and connection, often at the expense of sleep and embodied human interaction.
Through a female lens, my research and studio practice unfold across analogue and digital photography, embroidery, printmaking, oil painting, and installation. These processes require me to slow down, to be still, and to engage deeply with making. Each body of work manifests as a tangible artifact, an act of contemplation and resistance against the speed and spectacle of contemporary life.
I am particularly interested in how we now experience the world, whether through physical interaction or the mediated realities offered by screens, and what we consider more real.
The current work emerges after 28 years working as an editorial photographer in the fashion industry, creating images of women and girls, for women and girls. It spans a significant cultural shift: from the pre-internet era through the collapse of the magazine industry to today’s landscape, where we wield increased agency over our recorded identities and visual narratives.