Nathaniel Mellors (born 1974, Doncaster, England) is a British artist and musician.
He studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, the University of Oxford and the Royal College of Art. Mellors makes installations “packed with ad-hoc sculpture, psychedelic theatre and absurdist, satirical film”.
Mellors output includes installation, sculpture, film and video, music, perfor- mance, collage, painting, prints and critical writing.
His work in the show Art Now: The Way in Which it Landed, curated by Ryan Gander at Tate Britain in 2008, was Thinking Rock Speaks, an empty speech bubble made of steel attached to a lump of ala- baster. Jonathan Griffin in Frieze magazine said that Mellors “gets the last laugh … Sometimes there really is just nothing to say.”
In 2002 Mellors co-founded Junior Aspirin Records, a not-for-profit re- cord label releasing music by artists in limited editions. Mellors plays bass in the art-rock group Skill 7 Stamina 12 with Dan Fox, Ashley Marlowe and Maaike Schoorel, and has also released music with Toilet, God in Hackney, Mysterius Horse and under his own name.
In 2009 at the South London Gal- lery, he put on a one night stage version of his film, The Time Surgeon.
Jessica Lack in The Guardian described the variety of styles and genres in his films, “skimming off a wide range of artistic references from prog rock to hit TV series The Prisoner, with which he creates brilliantly offbeat installations”.
He was represented in the Tate Trienniel 2009, Altermodern, by a work Giantbum 2009, based on a story written by him about a party of medieval explorers who lose their way in the body of a giant.
The work used film and animatronic heads. Adrian Searle in The Guardian said: ‘There is a lot of bad act- ing and declaiming, a succession of dreadful puns, gags about a time-travelling Doctor Poo and Father Shit-mass, and some mock golden showers. Imagine the 120 Days of Sodom redone as panto.’ The work was also exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and a variant of it at Centro Cul- tural Montehermoso in Vitoria-Gasteiz.
In summer 2009, Mellors was commissioned by the BBC to make a short “work of modern art” to introduce the final episode of the cultural history series The Seven Ages of Britain, presented by David Dimbleby and directed by Jonty Claypole. The resultant work The Seven Ages of Britain Teaser featured Dimbleby voicing a silicon mask cast from his own face, alongside actors Gwendoline Christie (as ‘The Operator’) and Johnny Vivash (as ‘Kadmus’). The work was broadcast on BBC One on the 21 March 2010 and can be viewed on the BBC Seven Ages of Britain website.
Mellors is represented by Matt’s Gallery, London; Galerie Diana Stigter, Amsterdam; and Monitor Video & Contemporary Art, Rome.
He lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, London & Yorkshire, UK.
In September 2011, Mellors selected a playlist of music that inspires him in his work. “Music was my way into art school. I was involved in music from my very early teens – tape collage and improvising with a microphone and an analogue delay pedal with friends. We had no technical ability at all. It was great! The experience of improvising with sound has been a handy touchstone ever since in terms of approaching art making”.
His playlist includes Sonny Sharrock, GZA, Country Teasers and The Notorious BIG.