MELLOR 2024.291.005

Danie Mellor is an artist of Ngadjon-jii, Mamu and Anglo-Celtic ancestry, with much of his work focusing on his matrilineal roots to rainforest Country in the Atherton Tablelands. His practice upends archival imagery of Indigenous ancestors through drawing, painting and photography. Mellor’s Perpetual (gambunu) reworks a historical photograph of the artist’s own family, taken in the early twentieth century by Queensland photographer Alfred Atkinson. Mellor breaks Atkinson’s images apart, combining ghostly layers of his kin with rainforest vistas to create an uneasy composition that unearth narratives often silenced in archival material. 

Printed on polished steel panels, the work’s materiality forces the viewer to both literally and figuratively reflect on the legacy of these archival images within our shared histories. In bringing the past, present and future together in this medium, Mellor invites audiences to contemplate the layers of connections.