Queenie Whitaker Mellor (b.1978, West Country) is a UK-based artist whose practice explores presence, absence, and class erasure through material memory and emotional resonance. Her work documents the overlooked: offcuts, fragments, domestic scraps, photographs, and atmospheres charged by distance, dislocation, and refusal.

Lineage includes farmworkers, canal people, miners, Romany heritage, and quiet resistance lines like the Luddites. These aren’t romantic references — they’re lived realities.

I come from these people. I don’t make work about them — I make work through them. Their superstitions, survival strategies, rituals, and refusals live on in my nervous system, in my materials, and in my field.

Mellor’s practice rejects pristine aesthetics, technical purity, or symbolic catharsis. It is strategic, coded, and emotionally exacting. She works with what’s at hand — not to glorify scarcity, but to hold the charge of lives lived off-grid, off-record, and off-trend.

Her current body of work, The Unland, is a long-form inquiry into cultural invisibility and field presence. The title nods to Doris Salcedo’s series of the same name, in which unlikely materials are fused to spell grief and memory. In Mellor’s hands, The Unland becomes a terrain — part haunt, part holding zone — where the unnoticed gathers weight. It is not a narrative. It is not therapeutic. It is a condition. A resonance. A refusal to disappear.

Her work is as much about remembrance as it is about resistance — an ongoing challenge to the gatekeeping of contemporary art and a demand to honour the lives, labours, and energies that official histories fail to name.