{"id":552,"date":"2021-02-09T12:30:01","date_gmt":"2021-02-09T12:30:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/melinamerlin.com\/?page_id=552"},"modified":"2026-04-17T08:35:41","modified_gmt":"2026-04-17T08:35:41","slug":"552-2","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/melinamerlin.com\/?page_id=552","title":{"rendered":"projects"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Drawing a Fine Line: Situated Knowledge and Embodied Return<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Myths of Xochimilco<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Myths of Xochimilco<\/em> is a series of over seventy glazed stoneware works that engages clay as both material and archive. Working with earth and water, the project reflects on diaspora and the act of return, positioning clay as a repository of memory, gesture and cultural knowledge. Through an embodied making process, body, land and myth are brought into alignment, allowing the work to function as a living archive shaped through touch, weight and time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Glazed Stoneware, 2025<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
Myths of Xochimilco–The Paintings<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
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Acrylic, Oil, Charcoal on Linen, 180×240 cm, 2025<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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River Goddess<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

This installation reimagines feminine power and ecological resilience through gold-leaf sculptures placed on a 20 \u00d7 12\u202fft floor drawing. The installation activates the sculptures within a riverine landscape of marks and gestures, centring women\u2019s presence in both mythic and environmental flows. Through drawing and sculpture, the work transforms space into a site of memory, ritual and collective care.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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River Goddess–The Drawings<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A4, Ink, Graphite, Acrylic on Khandi Paper, 2025<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Mayan Moon, I & II<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Mayan Moon I and II form a paired exploration of transformation, labour and feminine tidal power. In the left, she abandons the crown of human authority, leaving imposed hierarchies to embody the immortal jaguar myth. An arm becomes paw, the swirling fish forms evoke sacrifice, allure and metamorphosis and the chaos that accompanies transformation. In the right, the story shifts towards sustenance and return; a celebration of woman as guardian of bounty and provider of a safe harbour. The layered fish honour the men and women who labour at sea. The cat, friend of both witch and sailor–for its own labour– bears witness. Together, the works trace an odyssey between myth and livelihood, power and provision, transformation and the home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Acrylic, Oil, Charcoal, Graphite on Canvas, 152×121, 2025<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Sardines, A Myth of Compression <\/h4>\n\n\n\n

This project explores labour, containment and inherited myths through performative intervention. This series unfolds across performance<\/a>, zines and photography, examining how historical narratives overlook women\u2019s work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Film & Photography (A3), 2025<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Sardines: The Drawings<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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A4, pencil, acrylic on khandi paper, 2025<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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zine, A6, 2025<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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Angle of Repose<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Angle of repose<\/em> refers to the steepest angle at which a material remains stable before it begins to slide. In this series of drawings and paintings, the term becomes a metaphor for the fragile balance between girlhood and the cultural pressures that push girls toward premature sexualisation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Oil, graphite, charcoal on canvas, 90×60, 2023<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Engaging female mythologies and historical narratives, the work examines how society destabilises the space where a girl is still allowed to be a girl. Figures appear poised at moments of tension and resistance, confronting the over-sexualisation of youth while reclaiming agency, visibility and complexity. Across mythic and contemporary contexts, the series centres women\u2019s experiences as sites of endurance, instability, and quiet defiance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Go Play with Your Dolls–the drawings<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A3, pencil, watercolour on paper, 2023<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Go Play with Your Dolls–oil on canvas<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Go Play with Your Dolls–acrylic, oil, graphite on panel<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Acrylic, oil, granite on panel, 4×2 feet, 2023<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Go Play with Your Dolls–mixed media<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Granite, ink, acrylic, oil on panel, 30×30, 2022<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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Atlantis to Yucatan <\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Atlantis to Yucatan<\/em> explores the layering of mediums\u2014charcoal, graphite, acrylic, and oil\u2014reflecting the accumulation of knowledge and memory over time.
The drawings are submerged in mythical waters, swimming between Atlantis and the Gulf of Mexico, tracing cultural histories and imagined landscapes beneath the surface.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Charcoal, acrylic, oil on canvas, 122×152, 2023<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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Bounty<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Bounty<\/em> is about the violent politeness of being called \u201cvaluable.\u201d About the way Mexican American bodies are framed as necessary, productive, essential\u2014so long as they remain harvestable. The work mocks the argument that some of us deserve to stay because we are \u201cassets,\u201d because we pick, clean, build, feed. As if survival should be negotiated through usefulness. As if dignity were seasonal labor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Across the three panels, bodies fracture, stretch, leak, and hybridize with agriculture. Limbs become tools. Flesh becomes surface. Desire and consumption collapse into each other. The \u201cexotic Latina\u201d appears not as fantasy, but as a grotesque construction\u2014ripe, exposed and grounded. She stares back, tenderness and beauty and barefoot–of and with the earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fruit is never just fruit here. It\u2019s code: for labour, for extraction, for sweetness. The compositions lean into caricature, into humour that borders on the uncomfortable, because that\u2019s where the truth sits\u2014somewhere between ridicule and recognition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEat the canon, spit the bones\u201d isn\u2019t a slogan\u2014it\u2019s a method. These works chew through art history\u2019s sanitised bodies and heroic myths, digesting what\u2019s useful and rejecting the rest. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Semillas, Basking, Harvest: Acrylic, Oil, Charcoal on Canvas, 152×121, 2025<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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She. Her. We.<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

These drawings explore female labour, solidarity and visibility in a reimagined underworld where European heroines and Mexican mythologies converge, merging myth, history and collective memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Big Time Drawings<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Big Time Drawings<\/em> began during a reading of Katy Hessel\u2019s The Story of Art Without Men<\/em>, reflecting on women, colonisation and their ongoing impact today. The series consists of oil-stick drawings on large sheets of paper, including works such as Amphitrite Before Poseidon<\/em>, Venus Before Botticelli<\/em> and Sea of Tranquility Before Apollo<\/em>. The scale and simplicity of the materials emphasise presence and reinterpretation of historical and mythological figures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Guadalupe before Jesus<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Inspired by the Big Time Drawings<\/em> and the ideas in The Story of Art Without Men<\/em>, the Lady Guadalupe<\/em> series reimagines female figures through myth, spirit animals and symbolic iconography. The works explore the representation of breasts in Western art, the presence of cultural and religious markers and the tension of borderlands, placing figures at the threshold between the USA and Mexico. Fruit from the Garden of Eden, exaggerated and surreal, punctuates the compositions. Executed in pastels and layered media with charcoal fencing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Political Poetry of Current Events<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Current events are drawings pulled from the headlines within my psyche. The overhead or misinterpreted conversations, glimpsed headlines and news bits you hear in the day. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Charcoal, graphite, acrylic & oil on canvas, 180×160 cm, 2023<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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A1, Charcoal, Graphite, Acrylic on Paper, 2021<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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Joy-Making in the Face of the Patriarchy <\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Joy<\/em> examines women\u2019s labour, agency and presence through the lens of the male gaze, questioning conventional standards of beauty. The series celebrates abject, imperfect and unconventional forms, exploring how joy and making can resist normative aesthetics and patriarchal expectations. Through performance,<\/a> photography and intervention, the work foregrounds creativity as both critique and affirmation, highlighting pleasure, play, and empowerment in defiance of traditional ideals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Unframed Photographs A3, 2025<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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Last Sunday in Mexico City<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Last Sunday in Mexico City<\/em> consists of eight drawings on 24 \u00d7 16\u202fin panels, executed with pencil, oil and scratching techniques. The series explores mortality, resilience & cultural memory through skeletons, women and cacti. These works reflect the experience of being a Mexican living in London and navigating life with love and grief. Layered mark-making and subtle textures trace the cycles of presence, loss, and belonging across personal and collective landscapes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Graphite, ink, acrylic, oil on panel, 51x20x2, 2025<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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Slip Interventions<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Slip Interventions<\/em> are printed inserts that intervene in canonical art texts, including E.H. Gombrich\u2019s The Story of Art<\/em>, to address historical omissions and amplify overlooked female artists. By inserting absent narratives directly into existing texts, the series critiques authority, visibility and the construction of knowledge, transforming archival and printed material into a site of performative, conceptual engagement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Original Drawings A5, Ink, acrylic on paper, 2024<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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La Frontera\/Borderlands (walking the line)<\/h4>\n\n\n
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Ink Wash on Fabric, 220×220 cm, 2020<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

Walk Through Epping Forest<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

The Epping Forest<\/em> series translates embodied experience into drawing, responding to walks through the forest in 2020. Each work captures the rhythm of movement, the sound of steps, creating a sensory dialogue between body, place and mark-making. Executed with bamboo drawing sticks and Indian ink on hot-pressed watercolour paper, these intimate works are among the smallest in the collection, emphasising close observation and tactility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A4, Indian Ink on paper, 2020<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Drawing a Fine Line: Situated Knowledge and Embodied Return Myths of Xochimilco Myths of Xochimilco is a series of over seventy glazed stoneware works that engages clay as both material and archive. Working with earth and water, the project reflects on diaspora and the act of return, positioning clay as a repository of memory, gesture and … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “projects”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-552","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/melinamerlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/melinamerlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/melinamerlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/melinamerlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/melinamerlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=552"}],"version-history":[{"count":154,"href":"https:\/\/melinamerlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/552\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1523,"href":"https:\/\/melinamerlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/552\/revisions\/1523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/melinamerlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}