Melinda is a painter and farmer. Her most recent work has been greatly influenced by the fact that, not too long ago and quite by chance, she arrived for the first time in a town near her ancestral home in the Campania region of southern Italy. She was immediately overwhelmed by a sense of déjà vu, of homecoming. She holds anxiety in her curiosity about who she is and where she belongs, in this context of  both forestieraand figlia (stranger and daughter), as if her being there has further heightened the intensity of a set of questions that she has always asked.

Through her work, she is most interested in attempting to document the process—the search for and exploration of identity and belongingness, as it applies to both a personal story as well as to the larger collective narrative. She is delighted by small mysteries, synchronicities; inexplicabilities. She is interested in the way memory (not just literal, tangible memories, but senses, suspicions, a feeling of connection and familiarity) affects the definition of self and maps our location in reference to “other,” (should there turn out to be such a thing in the end).

Her images are constructed as if she is searching for significance in the places, things, faces that rise to the surface of her mind together in ways that they might not have actually existed, like a dream that feels important, the meaning of which, however, often feels veiled. Behind and below there are things as important as what’s above and ahead. These opposing directions place us here, now—a position that feels very oddly both fixed and fluid.