Her oeuvre thematically and conceptually focuses on the intertwining thoughts she has about female archetypes, the feminine unconscious, auto-fiction, passion, and desire.

[3] Having grown up within the context of a multi-lingual family newly settling in Canada, La Melia began her creative endeavours from this very young age.

[3] In a statement from La Melia in an interview with Jacqueline Ross in 2013, she reveals that growing up in a bilingual home let her notice the slippages of language – that is the playfulness of puns or inventive cross-lingual jokes.

[6] The 2014 exhibition acted as a starting point for the text to be written, as it references many of the same multi-faceted themes such as Greek tragedy, teenage obsessions, the writings of Joyce Carol Oates, Mark Twain, Gertrude Stein or Yvonne Rainer.

As the title of the show and book suggests, La Melia is thinking about the presence of absence, and what nuances may spring from these interstitial spaces.

[7] Broom Emotion is a solo exhibition of La Melia's artwork curated by Frank Balland in Paris at Galerie Anne Barrault in 2017.

[1] In relation to Broom Emotion, Balland describes the invitational image as of a comb gliding through hair as being a central imaginative metaphor for many underlying themes of the exhibition.

“It starts with the comb’s teeth, having streaked the wet hair, greased with the gel agglutinating on the wooden handle, like sticky slobber, thick foam.

[8] Hou describes these paintings as “haiku sized”,[9] which references La Melia's inter-disciplinary approach to art making that takes creative writing texts as central to her practice.

La Melia also enlists water-jet cut mirrors within the installation that serve as a method for viewers to analyze their complicity towards self-identifying with art-objects.

Selected Writings 2005–2015 by Publication Studio in Vancouver,[11] but was republished in 2018 by Blank Cheque Press with additional texts and an updated foreword by the artist.

[2] The collection of poems evokes this image by weaving together various forms of writing that may not traditionally be considered to amalgamate into a cohesive literary structure.

[6] La Melia was selected as the national winner above fourteen other finalists of the 16th Annual RBC Canadian Painting Competition, a title which is also accompanied by $25 000 purchase prize of her artwork.

Specifically, La Melia explores the relationship of Euphemia McNaught and Evy McBryan and their impact on the historical artistic community of the region.