Melissa Webb
Melissa Webb is a nationally exhibiting fiber artist, educator, and independent curator working in the areas of site-specific installation, video, performance, and photography. She is represented by CAMP Gallery, Miami, and holds an MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Over her nearly 30-year career, Melissa has presented her work at numerous arts institutions, galleries, and festivals such as the BravinLee Project's The Golden Thread in Seaport, NYC, The Cranbrook Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, School 33 Art Center, Vis-Arts Rockville, ‘sindikit projects, the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) Baltimore, The Rotating History Project, Maryland Art Place, and with the Detroit Month of Design, Philadelphia Fringe, Transmodern, and Artscape Festivals.
Melissa maintains a practice of mounting immersive, site-responsive installation works in historically significant architectural spaces. Ambitious in scale as well as detail, her work has engaged diverse audiences in places such as the Frank Lloyd Wright Smith House in Michigan, the Stanford White-designed Lovely Lane United Methodist Church in Baltimore, and at Clermont Farm, a former 1755 slave plantation owned by the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. Residencies include ACRE in Wisconsin, Oxbow in Saugatuck, Michigan, and Prairie Ronde in Vicksburg, Michigan. She has been the recipient of a Kresge Arts in Detroit Gilda Award, a Robert Rauschenberg Artistic Innovation and Collaboration Grant, a Cranbrook Academy of Art Director’s Fellowship, a Baker Foundation project grant, and a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Sculpture. Melissa is from Baltimore, Maryland, and currently resides in Metro Detroit, Michigan.
My work is multi-disciplinary, a combination contemporary fiber art, installation, photography, and video. Layering accumulations of handmade textiles and textures, I pair traditional processes such as crochet, immersion dyeing, and surface embellishment with video and large-scale projection.
Physically immersive, site-responsive, and research-driven, my work acknowledges the historical contexts and material narratives of architectural spaces. I layer digital imagery, sound, and textile within a chosen space, creating immersive scenarios that viewers may enter and physically inhabit. I disseminate my visual perspective of settings both natural and industrial, translating a feeling of direct experience to the viewer.
My practice incorporates handmade textiles and decorative objects that mimic natural forms and hold untold stories of care. I archive, dissect, and recontextualize these items in what I see as a collaboration with the maker, often deceased and unknown. My process of making teases through constructs of beauty and vitality - a romantic, idealized vision of untamed nature that contrasts with humans’ fraught and destructive relationship with our home planet. I am drawn to the multitude of green hues in nature, recreating them in the dye bath to communicate a sense of growth, verdancy, and inevitable change. Through my work, I imagine a reclamation of the Earth by wildness - a less human-centered future where we learn to live and thrive in symbiosis with the natural world.
