Sophie Mellor is an artist and producer based in Plymouth and London. She has established a collaborative practice over the last twenty years, working across disciplines but with a specific interest in art and social transaction.
Sophie has a collaborative practice as Close and Remote with Simon Poulter. She also works as Mutiny, an arts organisation specialising in large scale public art works, with theatre director Marcus Romer and Simon Poulter.
Recent work with Mutiny includes ‘Reveal Hull‘ (2023-24) which turns your smartphone into a cassette player to explore 60 years of Hull’s music history; ‘Covid 19 Threads‘ (2020) a series of short films derived from twitter threads that have appeared during the Covid-19 pandemic; ‘Locus Solus‘ (2020) a live interactive performance in the online gaming platform Roblox; and ‘Future and Form‘ (2020) working with three writers as part of the University of East Anglia’s landmark project celebrating 50 years of their Creative Writing course, including Ayòbámi Adébáyò ‘Provenance‘, Imogen Hermes Gower ‘Eleanor‘ and Mona Arshi ‘Shifting Lines‘.
Recent Close and Remote projects include ‘Orchard‘ (2024) a new film exploring how green spaces play an important role in terms of bio-diversity and social well-being; ‘Large Blue‘ (2023) eco-sectionality and close looking at post-carbon futures; ‘A10 Live’ (2022) a road movie with no cars, fifteen days of discovery along the A10 road, involving artists, writers and musicians.
‘Bring Your Own Future’ (2017-2018) using watercolours and virtual reality to explore new ways of seeing Slough, commissioned by HOME Slough. ‘Live Model‘ (2017) a video and performative artwork commissioned by Bristol University, investigating regulatory systems that affect people in a variety of locations, including Bristol, Cardiff and Merthyr Tydfil. Invited participants (local residents, council workers, community workers, councillors) were taken on an immersive performance guided by The Control Voice and The Reality Guide. They experienced abstract regulation made visible. They experienced The Live Model.
Life Chances (2016-17), commissioned by Productive Margins, working with low income families in Bristol and Cardiff to create a parallel universe peopled with imagined characters. The parallel universe is expressed as a co-authored novel and online jewellery business, following the life chances of a group of characters created by members of the Single Parent Action Network (Bristol) and South Riverside Community Development Centre (Cardiff), imagining the future impact of current benefit system and political climate, and how changes to the system could radically change the characters life chances.
In 2015 Close and Remote projects included: ‘We Are What We Are’, commissioned by Creative Barking and Dagenham (2015), a road movie around 50 years of working lives in Barking and Dagenham; ‘Lost Characters‘, commissioned by Sefton Borough Council, a exploration of the councils photographic archive culminating in an exhibition at The Atkinson in Southport in Spring 2015.
Other recent Close and Remote projects include ‘Zone’ a participatory performance/video at Bidston Moss Nature Reserve in the Wirral, commissioned by FACT/The Mersey Forest; ‘Here Comes Everybody‘, part of the Secret Garden Project Lewisham commissioned by UP Projects.
She is a founding member of Girl Gang (2008-present), a group of women engaged in renegotiating public space. Sophie co-founded and co-directed Plan 9, an artist-led organisation in Bristol (2005-2010), curating a large body of new projects with her collaborators.
During 2019/2020 Sophie was a co-founder and co-director of CAMP, an artist-led support network in Devon & Cornwall.