Mel Brimfield

Mel Brimfield’s lively and diverse visual art practice takes a skewed and tangled romp through the already vexed historiography of performance, appropriating theatrical and mainstream entertainment formats and genres to appraise the use and value of received cultural hierarchies. Drawing together multiple institutions, agencies, curators and producers representing a broad spread of disciplines, her work is the result of intensive collaboration with a rolling cast of actors, composers and musicians, designers, choreographers, dancers and singers, resulting in photographic, film and large-scale live performance works.

Mel recently collaborated with composer Gwyneth Herbert to create a musical documentary film in the form of a Living Newspaper about visionary socialist theatre director Joan Littlewood for Art on the Underground. She built an ersatz Fluxus pianola-based kinetic sculptural installation for The Government Art Collection at the Whitechapel Gallery, and restaged Andy Kaufman’s Intergender Wrestling with comedian Simon Munnery for the London Word Festival. Mel Brimfield’s solo exhibitions include 'Death and Dumb', John Hansard Gallery (Southampton) 'Between Genius and Desire', Ceri Hand Gallery, (London); 'This is Performance Art – Performed Sculpture and Dance', Yorkshire Sculpture Park and Quantum Foam, Kinsale Arts Festival (Ireland).