[1] She and her first husband, Adrian Stokes, played an important role in the rise of St Ives as a magnet for artists.

Her family returned to East Lothian when she was one year old, shortly after the First World War broke out, so her father David Barclay Mellis-Smith could join up.

[2][1] Looking for a refuge from London before the Second World War broke out, they moved to a house, Little Parc Owles, in Carbis Bay, near St Ives, in 1939.

[1] Patrick Heron introduced Mellis to the painter Francis Davison, also recently divorced; they married in 1948 and lived for two years in the run-down Château des Enfants on the Cap d'Antibes.

[3] After 25 years of relative isolation and self-sufficiency, broken occasionally by visiting artist friends, they moved to Southwold in 1976, where she began to create driftwood sculptures.

[8] In 1980 Mellis started making constructions out of found pieces of driftwood, which was to become her central practice until the end of her career.

[13] In 2023 her work was included in the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.