Melissa Bell loves to paint images of water. In her work, blues and greens swim alongside one another in a colourful flow. “I grew up on the river in the backyard,” the artist says. “I was pretty lucky with that, living on country at Cummeragunja on Yorta Yorta, where I’m from. The water was always a part of me.”
Bell always loved art – and studied it at RMIT – but then her life got “a bit chaotic”. “I ended up meeting a partner, [which led to] domestic violence, and I lost my way,” she says. Bell was incarcerated for the first time in 2015 when she was in her late 20s, and four more times over the next five years.
