Melissa Rowe is a QLD based artist, university student and mother of six. She creates artworks across many different mediums, including quilting, drawing, painting, printmaking and ceramics. Having focused primarily on textile and quilt art for nearly two decades, Melissa returned to university and discovered a new passion in ceramics. She often works toward combining the more traditional art, like painting and printing, into her textile artworks. Melissa has also recently started exploring the world of photography and hopes to develop her skills further in this area.

Melissa is most interested in combining and exploring different forms of texture and colour. The interaction between different mediums and surfaces, and introducing different and contrasting mediums, techniques and subject matters. She is very tactile and examines the idea of art being experienced through multiple senses. Melissa is a big believer in learning the ‘rules’ behind different techniques and the reasons why, and then modifying or ignoring the rules altogether, exploring the concept that art has no rules by which it can be contained.

Her themes involve humanity and the future. She has an interest in exploring the idea of ‘what if’; with the evolution of technology and what that means for humanity and society. This also extends into a fascination with architectural evolution and decline, and concepts of space travel and beyond.

Melissa was involved in The Previous Owner exhibition, 2024, displaying four artworks. She has also previously taken part in the Canberra Quilters Quilting Exhibition, where she won the Margaret Armistead Award and the People’s Choice Award for her art quilt titled “In the light of day, and the dark of night”. It is a multimedia quilt artwork, combining many different fabric piecing techniques, machine quilting, thread painting, and beading.

Melissa is current working towards her goal of becoming a high school visual art teacher, aiming to inspire and assist future generations of artists to achieve their goals.