Melissa Mostyn

Art Forms

Drawing, Mixed media, Multi-disciplinary, Painting

Biography

I am a Deaf, neurodivergent, multidisciplinary visual artist and writer who loves to experiment with a range of materials as the mood takes me. I tend to work on a small scale out of necessity, with a multidisciplinary practice that blends fine-line drawing, mixed-media paper collage, watercolour, short films, wall murals, temporary installations, and clay and recycled junk models.

My approach can often be very disparate and fragmented, a reflection of my late ADHD diagnosis and my longtime role as a SEND parent.

That said, there is a thread running throughout my work of nostalgia, storytelling, family, child’s play and local flora/history. Being from a large extended family of writers and artists growing up in the Seventies and Eighties, I have great affection for this mix of memory and escapism, and I hope it shows.

Alongside my visual art practice, I have sustained a freelance portfolio career spanning the creative industries for over 30 years. In doing so I have attracted a prominent clientele including Tate, V&A, The Design Museum, Phaidon Press, Modern Art Oxford, The Royal Collection Trust, Arts Council England (South East), the BBC, Channel 4, and Maverick Television, and online and print media including Disability Arts Online, Vogue, Esquire, and The Independent. An alumnus of Central Saint Martins, I passed MA Fashion Journalism and Promotion with Distinction, and initially freelanced as a fashion journalist before I branched out. 

In 2005-2009 I was the Founder-Director of Salon D’Art CIC, a conceptual Deaf visual art organisation funded by Arts Council England South-East and the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation that ran residential and one-day art workshops in partnership with mainstream arts organisations and schools across the South-East and London. 

I later wrote and directed two films, the BSL drama short CODA (2011) and the acclaimed BSL documentary, listen, even when your heart is crying (2014), which won its first laurels at Aesthetica Short Film Festival 2015 and was a Best Documentary nominee at the CINEDeaf Awards in the same year. In 2021 Deafinitely Theatre produced my first virtual play, Keeping Hope, a 20-minute BSL monologue starring Nadia Nadarajah; in 2024 The Promise, my first full-length play co-written with Paula Garfield, toured the UK and the West End. 

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