Margaret Mellis

Margaret Mellis (1914–2009) was a Scottish painter and maker of constructions whose work moved between painting, collage, relief and assemblage. Closely associated with the development of modernism in St Ives during the Second World War, she later developed a highly individual practice centred on colour, structure and the expressive possibilities of found materials.

Born in China to Scottish parents, Mellis moved to Scotland as a child and studied at Edinburgh College of Art, where her teachers included S. J. Peploe and William Gillies and her contemporaries included Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and William Gear. In 1933 she was awarded the Andrew Grant Travelling Scholarship and studied in Paris under André Lhote.

Mellis married the writer and critic Adrian Stokes in 1938 and the following year they moved to St Ives. Their home became part of the small community of artists and writers that gathered there during the war, including Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo. Encouraged by Nicholson and Gabo, Mellis began experimenting with collage and constructed relief, working with paper, plywood and found materials. Examples were included in the exhibition New Movements in Art at the London Museum in 1942.

Following the end of her marriage to Stokes, Mellis formed a relationship with the artist Francis Davison, whom she married in 1948. They eventually settled at Syleham on the Norfolk–Suffolk border, where both continued to work away from the London art world. During the 1950s Mellis returned more fully to painting, producing still lifes, landscapes and increasingly abstract compositions.

From the early 1960s she developed a group of large abstract paintings which she called “colour structures”. Rather than following strict geometric systems, these were constructed intuitively through colour and repeated adjustment. Mellis described her concern as finding a way for colours to retain their individual strength while also functioning as part of the whole composition.

After moving to Southwold in 1975, Mellis began collecting pieces of driftwood and other discarded materials from the Suffolk coast. From 1978 these became the basis of a remarkable series of constructions in which weathered wood, paint and found objects were assembled through an intuitive process she compared with Surrealist automatism. These works became one of the most distinctive strands of her later practice.

A major retrospective was held at The Redfern Gallery in 1987, from which both Tate and the Arts Council acquired driftwood constructions. The exhibition also led to Mellis’s friendship with the young Damien Hirst, who contacted her after seeing the work and subsequently visited her in Southwold. She later exhibited with Hirst at the Pier Arts Centre, Orkney, in 2015.

Mellis was included in Tate’s landmark exhibition St Ives 1939–64 in 1985 and in the inaugural exhibition at Tate St Ives in 1993. A major retrospective opened at City Art Centre, Edinburgh, in 1997 and toured subsequently. More recently, Margaret Mellis: Modernist Constructs was presented at Towner Eastbourne in 2021–22 and subsequently at The Redfern Gallery, bringing together paintings, drawings and constructions from across her career.

Her work is held in major public collections including Tate, the British Museum, the National Galleries of Scotland, the Arts Council Collection, the Government Art Collection, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Pier Arts Centre and the Sainsbury Centre.

The Estate of Margaret Mellis is represented by The Redfern Gallery.