Fernanda Mello

Fernanda Mello (b.1988, Cacoal, Rondônia, Brazil) is a self-taught artist who lives and works in Newburgh, New York. Her upbringing in the Amazon region of Brazil began a deeply personal search as an artist to share her enthusiasm for indigenous narratives that are highly sophisticated and intertwined with every aspect of life in the natural world. In her work, Mello explores concepts of origin and interconnectivity, meditating on ecological cycles of life and death while she meticulously paints shapes that can be read as cellular organisms, celestial orbs, chains of beads, pearls, or shells. With constantly changing shapes, colors, temperatures, waves and tides, these meditative geometries reflect ancestral values in a process of decolonization of the subconscious, and hold space as symbols of protection of indigenous traditions and ecological systems.