Glacial Light. Bone china with paperclay inlay. 7 x 10.5 cm. Photo: Isamu Sawa.

As Mellor's forms achieved ever stronger presence, their sculptural qualities slowly came to the fore. She began to group bowls together so that they had a similar presence to clusters of sponges or corals whose shape and proportion had grown up in relation of each other. Both Glacial Light I and II work in this way. The shapes of three bowls in Glacial Light I amplify each others presence but also suggest that they may be part of an infinite natural series. The cone shapes easily formed groups that echoed the caves that inspired them.
Colour, when it occasionally appears, is also a sculptural element in Mellor's work. Given her creative aims colour must always appear to have come into being as a necessary element of the growth of the form, an aspect of its presence locked into its light. It can never be a decorative after thought. In the set of three Coral Vessels a faintly variegated tinge of sea green seems to have set solid in bone china. Its slight striations follow the form exactly as if they had been worn into place. Mellor takes care never to lose their translucency.
The dilemma of how to support craftwork with a primarily sculptural presence is almost perennial. Mellor's pieces might well be best presented with no support but the landscape, as discoveries in the tide line folds of a coastal reef, the cones attached to rocks and the bowls submerged in rocks shedding a crystalline translucent light through the ever moving water. This may not be practical, but shapes carved in light will always need to float or fly. Any base must contradict this impulse, the cone shapes present this problem most clearly since their forms are often predicated on growth downwards from a rocky ceiling. 

Mellor has two current solutions to this problem. For many forms, especially the cones, she uses pieces of brilliant white quartz crystal from a quarry in Sydney. Others, for instance a set of small sake cups or a bone china jug and cups, she presents surrounded by black paper or on black tray. These extremes of light and dark both allow the forms a vivacious existence in terms of the light that they capture and release rather than as mere curious shapes, shipwrecked in a display case.
Light is always at the centre of Mellor's work. Because of this she has been able to free her practice from the dilemmas of fashionable technical rhetoric while maintaining an enviable tension between her creative project and carefully disciplined technical innovation. Her works have an extraordinary independent presence. This is a rare and remarkable achievement.

REFERENCE:
1. The bone china recipe used is 30 parts kaolin, bone ash 45, potash feldspar 22.8 and silica 2.2. To this is added 2g dispex and 1g sodium silicate and 600ml water per dry kilo weight.