Melissa Rowe is a QLD based artist, university student and mother of six. She creates artworks across many different mediums, including drawing, painting, printmaking and ceramics. Her primary creative passion resides in textile and fabric art, and specifically quilt art. She often works toward combining the more traditional art, like painting and printing, into her textile artworks.

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.

Melissa has been involved in displaying some of her quilts at the Canberra Quilters Quilting Exhibition. She has won the Margaret Armistead Award and People’s Choice for her art quilt titled “In the light of day, and the dark of night”. It is a multimedia 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.