Fragments of a World from the Past
Liam Sawyers, aka Melville
It started in the quiet hum of a factory line, the rhythm of repetition pressing into the back of Liam’s mind. For eight years, he existed there, hands moving, body aching, thoughts slipping between the mundane, the monotony and physical strain. Art was the means of expression when everything else felt muted.
“Working in a factory is shitty.” - Liam Sawyers
Perhaps it was the factory’s relentless motion, or maybe it was the weight of nostalgia—memories of a past filled with VHS tapes, clunky CRT televisions, and the eerie warmth of analog distortion. Liam found himself drawn to these echoes of another time, the grainy textures of lost worlds. The past had a pulse, and he wanted to make it visible.
Liam’s artistic journey is deeply intertwined with his experiences, nostalgia, and a fascination with analog technology. From his early influences in the 2000s to his work in contemporary digital and visual media, his art is a conduit for emotion, memory, and personal expression. Perhaps it was the divine intervention of an injury that forced him to leave, leading him down a new path—studying at Humber College and later working as a project coordinator at Humber Galleries.
His early work was tangled in the aesthetic of digital decay—VHS distortion, dead internet theory, the kind of visual remnants left behind as technology marched forward. But nothing he created was artificial. Unlike the clean manipulations of After Effects, Liam’s visuals lived in the real, in the physical; the noise, the glitches, the imperfections were all raw. “I’ve always been interested in nostalgia,” he says, recalling the slow transition from analog to digital and how that shift altered not just the art world, but the emotional landscape of digital/media creation itself.
For Liam, music and visuals are inseparable—two halves of the same longing. He speaks of Boards of Canada, of Daft Punk, of the low, ambient hum of IDM soundscapes. More specifically Boards of Canada has always lingered in the background, an ever-present frequency threading through Liam’s life since he was 10, ever shaping the way he sees and feel the world.
Music wasn’t just inspiration—it was an unfinished path, a love left on the sidelines. When he first set out, he thought music would be his future, but the fear of losing joy in creation made him hesitate. Instead, he let sound and imagery intertwine, creating immersive installations that live somewhere between memory and the present moment. One recent project, displayed in Hamilton, looped decades-old footage across a gallery wall, blending past Supercrawl exhibitions with the present performances of DJs. Movement, texture, repetition—it was all part of the same conversation, a way of pulling forgotten fragments back into the light.
The weight of lost things lingers in all of Liam’s work. He returns to cassette tapes often—the act of inserting one into a player, the feel of the buttons, the way the sound is never quite perfect. It’s a small ritual, a bridge between past and present, between memory and the unknown. There’s comfort in the grain, in the hiss of imperfection.
But nostalgia isn’t the only force driving his work. Beneath the visuals, the soundscapes, and the textures, there is rage. Heavily invested in Canadian politics, Liam channels frustration through his art, though never in a way that demands interpretation. His work doesn’t hand out answers—it invites feeling, asks the viewer to find their own connection. “A lot of my stuff is abstract,” he admits. “It’s about emotion, not direction.”
The act of creation for Liam is a slow excavation of identity, of longing, of what it means to exist within a shifting world. In every flicker of VHS static, in every warped melody, there is something reaching outward—an invitation to remember, to reinterpret, to feel.
@melvillemusic
