The earliest of the five works, Melting Out is a typical example of Neel’s working process. Based on her own observations from the natural world and on subjects from the historical record – in this case news photographs of Ötzi, a 5,000 year-old mummy from the mountainous Austria-Italy border area – it marries abstraction with representation by way of a diverse range of painterly techniques.
The paint itself seems to thaw, melting away to reveal bits of rubbish and human possessions such as a tie, shoe, belt and sock in a nondescript landscape of an ambiguous historical or geographical setting. The cycle, one feels, seems set to continue, as the objects themselves decay back into abstraction.