Melanie Pearson/ Nature Reimagined

Mel creates immersive fantasy worlds from hand-cut paper and film, inspired by the rhythms of nature and the transient moment.

She initially studied film and did art direction for pop videos and magazine shoots, always on the low-budget side, though one of the videos got to No. 1 in the UK charts! She then worked as a specialist painter and furniture restorer, making and selling painted furniture and artefacts from recycled materials and things she found in skips. As a child, she drew comics on any paper she could get her hands on and drew with scissors from an early age. In later life, she started a pop-up cinema club specialising in immersive screenings with themes to match the film and venue, and has always loved to use site and staging to create a sense of wonder. She started making large paper cut images in the early 2000s, and these have gradually expanded into site-specific 3D work using coloured light and film projection.

Her inspirations since childhood are fairytales, forests, folk art, and mythology.