Melanie was born in 1972 and immigrated to Canada in 1995. Her work centers on human camouflage and blending into the environment, combining a sense of foreignness and alienation with a sense of belonging. Her paintings offer viewers a restrained intensity, touching and luring them to peek into the tangle of lines, brush strokes and color layout that form their own richly colorful and murky forest.

Childhood and family scenes show her perspective on the duality of her standpoint, the look of one who knows the landscape well, but is now looking at it from the outside.