Mellor has been making images of public figures for over twenty years, often exploring ideas of identity, fan culture and status. For this series, the artist drew primarily from British television legal dramas, in which Mellor’s recognizable protagonists – Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Daniela Nardini, Julie Walters – have been cast as members of an imaginary judicial system.
Scaled slightly larger than life, Mellor’s subjects are formally dressed in court attire, but have been superimposed with barnacles, jellyfish and other invented sea creatures. At times, these translucent cowls appear delicately decorative, almost ceremonial; at others, they bind torsos and obscure the actor’s face.
The underwater courtroom might suggest collusion in a rotten, corroded performance of the law. However if Mellor’s sunken QCs are not idealised, they also are not obviously castigated. Instead, the artist’s surreal portraits are ambivalent representations of justice, morality and class.
These works continue a long–term project focusing on creating paintings of multiple gangs of recontextualised TV and film actors playing characters dressed in work uniforms. The project began in 2013 with fictional art collective ‘The Austerians’ and the ‘Sirens’, from which works were acquired by Tate Britain and included in the current display ’60 Years’. The Trials and Tribulations of Wet Horse Hair forms part of a larger body of ongoing work. The full presentation was due to be exhibited at Glasgow International, which is now postponed to 2021.
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