Deep Salt Water began as an artistic exchange between myself and writer Marianne Apostolides and culminated in having the honour to create a suite of images that would be published in the book of the same title. Marianne Apostolides’ Deep Salt Water is a stirring memoir about loss and abortion, expressed through the layering of imagery from the ocean. My goal in producing the suite of images was to present a series of 10 images in 3 “trimesters”, paralleling the timeline of a full term pregnancy and offering a visual metaphor for the story Marianne crafted, which was embedded in endless imagery to choose from and explore.

“Deep Salt Water is a dialogue between poetic and visual texts that engages complex emotional responses.”

Feminist Studies, Volume 46, Issue 1, Editor’s Notes.

“This interpretation of the circle as uterine container makes yet another connection between Mellinger’s work and the genealogy of feminist art theory and practice, with this formal structure expressing central core imagery—an attempt to symbolically represent the female body. Far from decorating Apostolides’s prose, Mellinger’s collages are a significant way of grappling with the difficult knowledge of abortion as a grievable event.”

From Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst’s essay “Abortion as a Feminist Pedagogy of Grief in Marianna Apostolides’s Deep Salt Water” Feminist Studies, Volume 46, Issue 1.