Melanie Counsell

Melanie Counsell (born in 1964) is a British artist. She works with a multitude of media such as, sculpture, installation, 16 mm film, drawing, printed matter. Counsell has been resident at a range of art institutions, has undertaken roles in teaching and has won multiple awards for her works.

Early life and education Counsell was born in Pontypridd, Wales, and from 1983 to 1986, studied for a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Fine Art at the [|South Glamorgan Institute of Higher Education. Counsell subsequently studied for a Master of Fine Arts degree in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art part of the University College London between 1986 and 1988. Counsell installed a black-and-white film showing glass contents slowly evaporating obscured by an opaque plastic screen making it solely watchable at the back making one aware of the process of observation and place at the Coronet Theatre, London in 1993. and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award to Individual Artists: Sculpture & Installation two years later. Four years later, Counsell received the London Arts Individual Artist Award.

In 2006, Counsell became a resident of the Ateliers Internationaux du Frac des Pays de la Loire, She was appointed external examiner of the Edinburgh College of Art at the University of Edinburgh and held the same position at the University of Gloucestershire for students sitting a Bachelor's degree in Fine Art in 2013. Counsell's recent works were on "new psychological environments through intense manipulation of time and space, architecture and object." Caroline Smith of Women's Art Magazine wrote that Counsell's works "has a maturity which surpasses much contemporary installation work, where concepts become lost in the environment and meanings are muddled or over-worked, sledgehammer-style." Smith also noted that the artist "opened herself to the increase of fast, shiny media language, art which addresses a mish-mash of cultures, signs and symbols, out of which have been born more global codes of understanding." Artforum 's Michael Corris noted her appeal was "in its capacity to debunk a viewer's preconceived expectations of art" and the success was down to the "possibility of constructing a convincing rebuttal to our art-perceiving expectations."