I make work with no real budget, no safety net, and no art-world permission. I don’t wait for any of it. My work is built from leftovers and residue — what persists in the absence, what hums loudest in the gaps.

Everything I make is slightly off: familiar but strange, honest but staged, domestic but uncanny. That threshold — the moment something real flickers just before it disappears — is where I work.

My work lives in the in-between: the half-light, the unhomely, the hinge where meaning moves. Every object carries that tremor — a found frame hiding another work behind it, a phrase repeated until it unravels, a piece that’s “a bit shit” because it had to be.

Each work holds its own small haunting: a residue that won’t resolve, a pressure you can’t quite name. Sometimes the shift hits immediately. Sometimes it waits until you’ve left the room. I engineer that moment deliberately — when recognition tilts, the ordinary becomes uneasy, and perception stutters just long enough for something else to flicker through.

To walk the margins is to stay sensitive, feral, awake. They say a weed is just a flower growing where someone doesn’t want it. Like weeds, my work endures. It grows in the cracks. It’s made between things — between systems, between worlds.

It’s making art when no one’s clapping.

It’s doing it anyway.

— Queenie Mellor

Winter 2025