ARTIST SPOTLIGHT: From Paper to Poetry: The Art of Melissa Szalai
For Melissa Szalai, what began with simple handmade cards has evolved into a distinctive art practice combining intricate paper layering, painting, embellishment and poetry.
About 14 years ago, Melissa began making cut-and-paste cards as gifts for family and friends, incorporating her own original verse and poetry. From those early experiments with craft punches, she progressed to hand-cutting individual pieces and quickly fell in love with the look, feel and versatility of paper.
Over the years, Melissa has continued to develop and refine her own paper-layering technique, which she calls Practique de Papier, French for “practice on or with paper”.
For Melissa, developing the technique has been about much more than mastering a medium. It has become “a journey of self-discovery and much discipline”.
Artistic Style and Influences
Melissa describes her work as intuitive, with a strong leaning towards the whimsical. Her inspiration comes from themes of mystery, innocence, love and beauty, reflected in both the natural environment and humanity.
These influences can take many forms in her work, from cats, wings and hearts to pineapples, dragons and masks, with each piece developing its own character.
Her poetry is also an important part of her creative expression. Through both her visual art and her writing, Melissa seeks to create something that resonates with her audience on a deeper level.
Creative Process
Melissa is passionate about the process of creating her work, and patience is very much part of that process. Some pieces take many hours and incorporate hundreds of individually cut elements.
“It is a bit like creating a jigsaw puzzle,” she says. Each work begins with sourcing and sorting through sheets and scraps of paper and coordinating a colour palette. Melissa then cuts a template, paints the paper either before or after cutting the individual pieces, and begins the painstaking process of layering and gluing them onto the template.
Glass beads, stones, pearls and other embellishments are added to bring the work to life.
The combination of papers, colours, painted elements and embellishments means that no two pieces are ever the same. Each is entirely original.
Artistic Journey
A significant part of Melissa’s recent artistic journey has been exhibiting her work and seeing it connect with others.
She is particularly proud to have been selected as a finalist in the annual Great Barrier Reef Art Exhibition for the past two years and values the encouragement and support she has received from Creative Connections Whitsunday.
Melissa is also deeply grateful to have sold a number of her works over the past two years. One of those connections led to a commission that would challenge her to take her art in a new direction.
Challenges and Growth: Wings of Hope
Melissa was commissioned to create a work incorporating small pieces of the Berlin Wall together with original prose, with the central theme of hope.
The project required a very different approach from her previous work and gave her the opportunity to experiment with new materials and techniques.
Using modelling paste and acrylic paint, Melissa created a heavily textured background intended to capture the brutal, crumbling character of the Berlin Wall. A jagged crack through the centre was filled with metallic papers and crushed glass beads, symbolising light breaking through the fractured wall.
Across the surface, she incorporated stencilled and handwritten words from a poem she wrote specifically for the piece, adding another layer of meaning and personal expression.
Against the harsh, weathered texture of the wall, Melissa placed one of her signature elements: delicate paper wings.
The resulting work, Wings of Hope, creates a powerful contrast between destruction and fragility, darkness and light, confinement and freedom.
Future Plans and Goals
The experience of creating Wings of Hope has opened up new possibilities for Melissa’s work.
She loved the learning curve that came with experimenting with different mediums and is keen to create more mixed-media pieces that tell a story, while continuing to expand her individual reflective works.
Commission work is another area she would like to explore further, particularly where it gives her the opportunity to respond to a story, idea or personal meaning through her art.
From hundreds of tiny pieces of paper to poetry, texture, glass and paint, Melissa’s work continues to evolve. At its heart, however, remains the same fascination that began with those first handmade cards 14 years ago: the possibilities of paper, the pleasure of the creative process, and the desire to make something that connects with others.
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