RUBY Projects is pleased to host a residency with Melanie Abrantes, a Portuguese-American artist and woodworker whose sculptural practice repositions domestic objects as sites of memory, labor, and care.
Abrantes is best known for her hand-turned wooden vessels, furniture, and architectural objects that exist between utility and sculpture. Working primarily with salvaged and locally sourced wood, she approaches making as an act of preservation — not only of material, but of gesture, rhythm, and inherited knowledge. Her work foregrounds the often invisible labor embedded in the home and the body, reframing craft as a conceptual and political space rather than a decorative one.
Her practice has been exhibited internationally and featured in The New York Times, Architectural Digest, Domino, and Sight Unseen, among others. Across these contexts, her work maintains a quiet insistence: that intimacy, care, and slowness are not ancillary to contemporary life, but central to it.
During her residency at RUBY Projects, Abrantes will be developing a new body of work that extends her ongoing inquiry into domestic ritual, feminist labor histories, and the emotional life of objects. Visitors can expect to encounter works in progress that explore:
the relationship between touch, time, and form
how functional objects hold personal and collective memory
how the home operates as both a political and emotional architecture
how slowness can function as resistance within accelerated cultural systems
The residency will include open studio hours, informal conversations, and a culminating presentation that invites the public into her process — not only to view finished works, but to witness how meaning is built through repetition, patience, and care.
Melanie’s residency reflects RUBY Projects’ ongoing commitment to practices that are materially rigorous, conceptually grounded, and emotionally resonant — work that resists spectacle in favor of depth, and presence in favor of performance.