Melissa Joseph’s practice moves fluidly between textile, sculpture, painting, and installation, grounded in an exploration of memory as both a tactile and conceptual material. Working primarily with wool felt, fabric, and clay, she transforms domestic materials into poetic acts of care and preservation—rendering the personal archive of family photographs, inherited gestures, and collective diasporic experience into evocative, tactile form.

Her process often begins with intimate photographic references, snapshots of everyday life, family gatherings, and overlooked details which she reinterprets through labor-intensive methods of felting and material layering. This translation of image into fiber becomes a metaphor for the intergenerational transmission of memory, where touch, repetition, and craft perform as acts of remembrance and repair.

Across her practice, Joseph engages themes of diaspora, motherhood, and the unseen work of women, reimagining domestic space as a site of resistance and resilience. Her works negotiate the contradictions of diasporic living—between visibility and erasure, intimacy and distance, nostalgia and adaptation—inviting viewers to consider how personal histories intersect with the broader narratives of migration and belonging.

Formally, Joseph’s installations often occupy thresholds between the monumental and the intimate, the painterly and the sculptural. Whether suspended, embedded in architecture, or scaled for public spaces such as her 2025 Brooklyn Museum commission Tender, her works transform material surfaces into living memoryscapes, quiet yet monumental tributes to tenderness, endurance, and kinship. Her methodology is rooted in a feminist and diasporic poetics of material, where the labor of making becomes both subject and form. Through felt’s capacity to absorb, hold, and blur, Joseph articulates a visual language that resists fixed narratives and instead embraces the soft, interstitial qualities of lived experience.