Danie Mellor’s dramatic studies of natural forms and Country captivate viewers while challenging certain historical perceptions, writes Sophia Sambono. Recently, the artist generously gifted two major works to the Collection.

Through his multidisciplinary practice, artist Danie Mellor deftly explores Australia’s shared history through the lens of his Ngadjonjii, Mamu and Anglo-Australian heritage and his ongoing connection to his mother’s Country in the Atherton Tablelands in far-north Queensland. The artist’s ‘landspaces’ (rather than landscapes) encompass multiple, co-existing ‘everywhen’ worldviews of Country¹ that celebrate the ‘transcendent ecology of nature’ and give life to cultural histories and ancestral narratives.²

A time of the World’s making 2019 is an installation that extends Mellor’s meticulous, widely admired drawings executed in monochromatic blue crayon with overlaid figures and objects rendered in full colour. The artist’s ongoing use of a blue and white palette echoes the dinnerware and tea sets produced by English ceramic company Spode around the same time Australia was claimed for the British Empire. In Mellor’s hands, the blue and white motif becomes a potent symbol of European capture and ultimate transformation of landscapes and cultures.³ These idyllic scenes, presented on dinnerware, romanticised foreign places and cultures, framing them as something ‘exotic’ to be consumed. As Mellor explains, ‘Pictures were revealed as the meal was eaten, and people were literally “consuming culture”’.⁴

In A time of the World’s making, scale and perspective are manipulated within the deep frame that allows the concave display of the image. This curving space is then combined with suspended or collaged elements to create an engaging dioramic experience that draws in the viewer. Anne Ryan, curator of ‘Dobell Drawing Biennial 2020: Real Worlds’ (for which the work toured in 2020–21), suggests that the layered figures ‘challenged [viewers] to consider the enduring histories of human occupation of the land’.⁵

A time of the World’s making and ‘Real Worlds’ partner work A Landspace: bala ngunyiny [the tableau, bala jarrga] 2020 are reconfigured, as new and evolved works, from Mellor’s APT8 contribution titled Deep (forest) 2015, which consists of 27 panels, depicting lush rainforest vistas. In each of the new works, Mellor’s alignment of the individual panels is deliberately disjointed symbolic of ‘cartographic grids and the ways in which the landscape was divided using Western knowledge systems (mapping, surveying, and division [to signal] title/ownership and colonial taking)’.⁶

Matter Matters 2019 expands Mellor’s exploration of ‘landspace’ to three-dimensional sculpture. Commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Matter Matters echoes the dramatic root systems of the ancient mangrove species Avicennia marina (grey mangrove) commonly found in the intertidal regions of tropical and subtropical coastlines.

Matter Matters responds to the dynamic ‘mystery of nature’s breath’ and the ongoing relationship between mangroves, coastal spaces and their inhabitants.⁷ Mangrove stilt roots, like those Mellor depicts, have many pores through which the plant filters toxins and ‘breathes’ oxygen into the atmosphere. The anthropomorphic, almost ghostly, presence of the work reminds audiences ‘how deeply we are connected to natural spaces’.⁸ The work has powerful resonance in its new home at QAGOMA alongside the mangrove-lined Brisbane River.

Danie Mellor’s meticulous rendering of his mother’s country in A time of the World’s making, and the soaring bronze mangrove roots of Matter Matters, are powerful affirmations ‘of the beauty of natural architecture’ that aim to foster more nuanced and complex reflections on place and culture within Australia.⁹ 

Sophia Sambono is Associate Curator, Indigenous Australian Art.

Endnotes

1. Barnaby Smith, ‘Danie Mellor on creating ‘landspace’ with painting and photography’, Art Guide Australia, 19 August 2020, viewed March 2021.
2. Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, ‘Danie Mellor, Matter Matters 2019’, 19 August 2019, viewed February 2021. 
3. Danie Mellor, Maudie Palmer (curator), Samantha Littley (coordinating curator), Hetti Perkins, Fiona Nicoll and Lisa Slade, Danie Mellor: exotic lies sacred ties [exhibition catalogue], University of Queensland Art Museum, St Lucia, Queensland, 2014, p.49
4. Anne Ryan, ‘Walk though of the ‘Real Worlds’ exhibition with curator Anne Ryan’ [video], Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 23 October 2020, viewed 16 February 2021.
5. Danie Mellor, email to Sophia Sambono, 21 February 2021.
6. Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, ‘Danie Mellor artist interview’, 17 February 2020, viewed February 2021.
7. Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, ‘Danie Mellor’s new sculpture commission’, 19 August 2019, 
8. Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, ‘Danie Mellor artist interview’.
9. Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, ‘Danie Mellor, Matter Matters 2019’.