Mella studied for a BA in Anthropology at Durham University, where she obtained a First Class degree, specialising in the anthropology of art, critical theory and material culture. After a period making documentary films, she moved to London to work in the museum sector and became Head of Exhibitions at Dulwich Picture Gallery and later Exhibitions Manager at the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge. This career was dovetailed with her ceramic practice; in 2009 she took a two-year Diploma in Ceramics at City Lit, London and went on to complete an MA in Ceramics and Glass from the RCA, graduating in 2013. Mella now lives and works in Edinburgh where she combines her ceramic practice with teaching and freelance curation. She is a visiting lecturer on the BA Ceramic Design course at Central Saint Martins (London), Tutor at Edinburgh Ceramics Workshop and a recent board member for Visual Arts Scotland. In the last ten years since graduation from the RCA, Mella has shown work nationally and internationally. In 2018 she showed at Collect Open, in 2021 was awarded the Henry Rothschild Ceramic Bursary Prize and in 2023 the British Ceramics Biennial Award.
Mella Shaw compassionately engages with the current ecological crisis and the ways in which non-human and human bodies are deeply entangled. Her ceramic series within Earthly Bodies, titled Unheard, has evolved from a previous installation titled Sounding Line for which she was recently named the winner of the British Ceramics Biennial Award, the UK’s largest prize for ceramics. The project documented and memorialised a mass beaching of whales off the West Coast of Scotland directly caused by human-made sound and sonar pollution within the surrounding body of water. Within Soundline, Mella combined the whalebone ash into the clay and wrapped the works in marine ropes, to carry the vibrations of the sonic technology, which could be felt and experienced through the visitor’s hand.
Mella’s work is heavily influenced by her own experience of finding a beached whale in the sand on a deserted headland on South Uist, Outer Hebrides. The resultant sculptural forms are based on inner ear bones from deep-diving whale species as well as extraordinary, naturally occurring, sand-etchings found on the same beach. They capture the mysteriousness of these encounters as well as consciously raising awareness about the environmental issue of sound pollution and the non-human lives at stake. This new subsequent work, Unheard, invites a broader interpretation still; referring to them as ‘intentionally ambiguous’, the Unheard pieces signal themes of otherness and struggle. Paradoxically, they also invoke fluidity and movement, some gender these ceramic pieces as masculine or feminine, but to Mella they are both, signalling the subjectivities embedded within our perceptions and the power of sculptural form to bring these to the surface.