Born in 1978 in the West Country, Queenie Whitaker Mellor is an artist whose practice explores British folklore, ancestral resilience, and the untold histories embedded in working-class traditions. Her work continues the stories passed down through generations, revealing how acts of defiance, survival, and superstition shape cultural identity.

Mellor’s practice is deeply rooted in the spiritual beliefs and traditions of her lineage—farmhands, canal people, miners, Romany heritage, and resistance movements like the Luddites. These histories manifest in her work through objects, adornment, superstition, and ritual—ordinary things imbued with extraordinary meaning.

At its core, her work unearths the undercurrents of humanity: the shadows of collective consciousness, the relics of forgotten lives, and the traditions that persist beneath the surface. Themes of duality, ritual, transformation, and ambiguity run throughout her practice, reflecting on endurance, rebellion, and survival. She also confronts the class ceiling in the arts, exposing the systemic barriers that still dictate who is seen, remembered, and valued.

Her latest body of work, Once More with Feeling, is a reclamation of memory and identity. By forging new relics adorned with the textures, symbols, and marks of her ancestors, Mellor honours their spirit of resilience, stoicism, and quiet defiance. These pieces serve as a bridge between past and present, inviting audiences to reconsider what is truly valued in our collective history and in the communities we build today. Through this process, she ensures that the forgotten are not lost to time, their voices no longer erased by the very systems that once sought to silence them—oppressive regimes that did not recognise their worth, and didn't even know their names.

Her work is as much an act of remembrance as it is an act of resistance—a refusal to let creativity be dismissed as a leisure pursuit, a challenge to the ongoing disparity in who gets to decide what is considered art and whose stories deserve to be told.