Joyce Melander

Joyce Melander is an artist fascinated by the constructed object. Using a variety of processes such as weaving, crochet, embroidery and sewing, the artist’s intricately assembled sculptures carry traditional craft methods into the context of fine art.

She incorporates a wide array of materials in her work, bringing wool, glass beads, textiles and wood veneers into a rich, almost musical, interplay of texture and rhythm.

She lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a place whose desert landscape and crisp, bright colors inspire the artist’s vividly hued palette and organic shapes. Melander brings this inspiration into the studio not to duplicate the outside world, but to synthesize her surroundings and observations into something entirely new.

A lifelong pianist, Melander plays daily, incorporating musical terms into many of her titles: Rondo, Allegro Non Troppo, Glissando. Her elaborately patterned, delicately worked sculptures, often arranged in lilting, organic configurations, bring to mind the musical abstractions of Kandinsky, whose fascination with the “sound of color” established the artist as a pioneer of western abstraction. Melander’s approach is a more postmodern one, preoccupied with artisanal process, material opulence and extravagant construction.