Melissa sees image-making as a way to probe the relationship of the body to the fleeting experiences it has and grapples with to own, to remember, and to communicate; the creative process as a way of producing objects that live between internal abstract worlds and external linguistic and physical worlds.

Often starting in the library and working with photocopies, from her roving of an enormous web of information and images that have amassed, her work primarily explores gestures and fragments of visual information, leaving room for the growth and evolution of an image through process. It experiments with reorganization and creation of new forms from those fragments. It is a meditation on rhythm, pauses, and movement; highlighting the brevity of a moment.

Lately her concerns have centered around coaxing the tangents, and the imagined extension of lines and objects, into space. She's been imagining new ways to consider space and complicating the lines between dimensions and mediums. She is most interested in exploring gravity and its relation to vision.

Her work contributes quietly and personally transformed images to a massive body of images, playfully and organically reinserts them into environments, and offers a place for one's vision to momentarily dwell.

Excavate—to remove earth or soil by digging or scooping out, to dig in a place carefully and methodically taking notes about procedures, conditions, and finds, with a view to uncovering objects of archaeological interest, to form a shape or cavity by hollowing, to discover or uncover something valuable by effort.

Poised—fully prepared or in position and about to do something, motionless and balanced, or motionless and suspended in the air, often just before or in the midst of an action, calm, self-assured, and dignified, teetering on the edge of a sudden change.