Ramsden was born in Ilkeston, Derbyshire, Great Britain. He studied at Nottingham College of Art from 1961 to 1963, went to Australia in 1963 and studied at the National Gallery School of Victoria from 1963 to 1964. In 1967 Ramsden moved to New York City in the United States and began the series of the Secret Paintings and the Two Black Squares.

Ramsden, along with Ian Burn, co-founded the Art Press and The Society for Theoretical Art and Analysis in New York City in 1969. Ramsden became a member of Art & Language in 1971.

As a member of Art & Language in 1972, Ramsden participated in Documenta 5 in Kassel with the project "Index 0001" in the department Idea + Idea/Light, together with the Art & Language artists Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge, Ian Burn, Charles Harrison, Harold Hurrell, Michael Baldwin and Joseph Kosuth. With Art & Language he was also represented at Documenta 6 (1977), Documenta 7 in 1982 and Documenta X in 1997.

Since 1977, Baldwin and Ramsden have continued Art & Language as a project. In the meantime, an extensive body of work of objects and images has been created. Many texts were written with Charles Harrison and Michael Baldwin, who has been publishing "Art-Language" since 1971.

Ramsden currently lives in Middleton Cheney near Banbury, England.

• Exhibition catalogue: documenta 5: Questioning reality - visual worlds today; catalogue (as file) Volume 1: (material); Volume 2: (list of exhibitions); Kassel 1972
• Documenta Archiv (ed.); Wiedervorlage d5 - Eine Befragung des Archivs zum documenta 1972; Kassel/Ostfildern 2001, ISBN 3-7757-1121-X
• Catalogue for documenta 6: Volume 1: Painting, Sculpture/Environment, Performance; Volume 2: Photography, Film, Video; Volume 3: Hand Drawings, Utopian Design, Books; Kassel 1977 ISBN 3-920453-00-X
• Catalogue: documenta 7 Kassel; Vol. 1: (Visual biographies of the artists); Vol. 2: (Current works of the artists); Kassel 1982 ISBN 3-920453-02-6
• (documenta 10 catalogue): Politics - Poetics - the book for documenta X; Kassel/Ostfildern 1997, ISBN 3-89322-909-4 (German) / ISBN 3-89322-911-6 (English)
• Marzona, Daniel: Konzeptkunst; Cologne, 2005, ISBN 3-8228-2959-5
• Kosuth, Joseph: "The Artist as Anthropologist", Art After Philosophy and After, MIT Press, 1991, p. 117

• Examples of his works
• Art & Language at the Lisson Gallery
• Art & Language: Blurting in A & L online
• Materials by and about Mel Ramsden in the documenta archive