Born in Illinois, USA, Melinda Schawel received a BA in Fine Art and Communication from the University of California Santa Barbara in 1993 and a Postgraduate Degree in Printmaking from RMIT in 1996. She has exhibited regularly since 1995 and has been selected for a number of prestigious commissions including the Westin Hotel and the Park Hyatt. Her work has been published by Murtra Edicions in Spain and is represented in numerous collections including the National Gallery of Australia and the Royal Museum of Fine Art, Antwerp, Belgium.

Incorporating snippets of text sourced from postcards, letters and notes into her multi-media collages, Schawel has created her own visual language, in which common turns of phrase allude to the delicate boundaries of personal memory and cultural conscience. In her more recent works, Schawel's focus has turned to the material. Using traditional media in unconventional ways, papers collaged onto wood are sanded, ripped away, covered in ink washes, written on, and waxed.

'...I continue to build up the surface and push the boundaries of the medium..by peeling, tearing and perforating the paper until it borders on the three dimensional. The process represents the challenges of being in transition, of being pulled in different directions, the feeling of occupying two or more spaces at once, of trying to maintain the delicate balance between control and unpredictability. Essentially, the mixed media works in Torn are experimental iterations driven by a love of materials and surfaces and the search to find the optimum point where ideas, technique and media come together.'
Melinda Schawel 2012

www.melindaschawel.com