Forage to Fossil

Artist Bio

Melissa Mulder’s art is a conversation between fragility and endurance, between the fleeting and the eternal. Trained as a florist (Humber College, Etobicoke; Blom Masters Program, Gouda, Netherlands), she spent 25 years “painting with petals,” immersed in the colours, scents, and brief lifespans of flowers. This intimacy with impermanence deepened during the years she accompanied her father through dementia, an experience that awakened her need to preserve fragility as a testament, not only of beauty, but of memory.

Her practice has since evolved into a dual thread of fresco-secco relief painting and canvas-based landscapes. In her reliefs, Melissa presses fresh flora and foliage into gypsum, embedding their essence into stone. Pigments flow over and through the impressions in translucent and opaque layers, echoing the struggles and triumphs of natural growth—stretching toward light, bending under wind, rooting into whatever supports survival. In her canvases, by contrast, she finds freedom: atmospheric explorations of the wilds of nature, where colour moves unhindered across open space.

Together, these two practices form the rhythm of her work: fresco grounding her in tactility and memory, canvas opening her to flow and expansion. Both reflect her desire to capture the vibratory field of nature—landscapes, floralscapes, and the aura of place—as lived experience rather than static image.

Melissa is represented by County Creative Gallery in Prince Edward County, Ontario. Her work is collected in Canada, the UK, and the USA. She welcomes visitors by appointment at her Hamilton studio and shares her works through her website, Forage to Fossil.