Don’t look away! Thoughtful art confronts history
Danie Mellor’s art portrays history and the landscape and invites viewers to consider the present in light of the past.
Sometimes our colonial history is so confronting we want to turn away from it. But artist Danie Mellor doesn’t want us to avert our gaze and instead invites us to consider history and the landscape in his unique body of work across multiple mediums.
Mellor is a thoughtful artist who considers his work, and his words, carefully. At the launch of his exhibition Danie Mellor: marru/the unseen visible, now showing at Queensland Art Gallery, he spoke in a measured and inclusive, even beguiling way about his work.
And then we moved into the gallery where the work is on display. It was like stepping into a lost world where Mellor presents us with a range of works exploring Australia’s shared history through the lens of his Ngadjon-jii, Mamu and Anglo-Celtic ancestry and ongoing connection to County in the Atherton Tableland and rainforests of Far North Queensland.
Using historical imagery sourced from various institutions, including the British Museum, and featuring the landscape he knows so well, this exhibition is an immersive experience. A video work featuring the majesty of the Atherton Tableland (Dark star waterfall) is compelling and awe inspiring.
Mellor worked closely with Sophia Nampitjimpa Sambono, Associate Curator, Indigenous Australian Art, QAGOMA on the exhibition and it was, he says, a very enjoyable collaborative process.
He lives and works in the Southern Highlands of NSW and has lived a peripatetic life, yet he constantly returns to Queensland where he was born (in Mackay) and where his ancestral connections run deep.
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“This is where I come from,” he explains when we chat after the exhibition launch. “My work is local and regional, on the one hand, but there is an element of the micro and macro. And I’m portraying history through a particular lens.”
The exhibition brings together Mellor’s new works examining memory and remembrance, the relationship between First Nations people, culture and Country, and the environmental and social impact of colonial history.
Mellor doesn’t shy away from some of the difficult aspects of our shared history, but he presents us with work that explores and is cleverly confronting and intriguing.
The remembering (forever in history) (main picture) is a work that deals with the collision of cultures in an almost romantic setting – a coastal scene with Indigenous people in the foreground and ships just offshore symbolising colonial incursion.
“What I find fascinating about photos and images from the past is they convey a sense of existential change,” Mellor says. “Trauma and uncertainty is present but at the same time I’m keen on understanding those relationships that brought people together. What happens with some historical narratives is that they move towards a binary or polarised experience, but I’m interested in the subtle and nuanced passage of time. There is a broader and subtler conversation to be had with history.”
His work is backgrounded by Country because, after all, the landscape is the background, the frame and the basis of everything and it is the silent witness to history.
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Mellor visits this landscape each year and communes with elders and communities to help him understand how geography and history are connected and how “there are multiple histories opened up and revealed” along the way.
On the edge of darkness (the sun also sets) 2020. Acrylic on board with gesso and iridescent wash. Private collection © Danie Mellor
Dark star waterfall (still) 2025 Two-channel video projection; historic footage and images: National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, Queensland State Archives, State Library of Queensland Courtesy: The artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne © Danie Mellor
Dark star waterfall is a highlight – a 24-minute-long video work showcasing the majesty of the landscape of the Atherton Tableland which, Mellor says is just as beautiful if a little less well-known than the Daintree.
In an essay about the exhibition written by First Nations art and culture specialist Bruce Johnson McLean, Mellor’s approach is described as “a position of neutrality … creating historical tableaux in which figures are presented together in a landscape, but rarely divulging any sense of narrative”.
“Instead, he allows the viewer to narrate the scene in their mind. In doing so, he subtly prompts the viewer to question their own interpretation of the image by asking us how our cultural conditioning and understanding of history, both taught and learnt, has created the story we imagine. Given to us without supporting information, any stories inspired by Mellor’s images, as read by the viewer, are precisely that: stories.”
So, there is no hectoring or lecturing and this is part of the magic of Mellor’s unique approach.
This doesn’t mean he is without passion or conviction, far from it. But he is the consummate artist who allows the work to speak to each of us, individually. Which is, I guess, why I saw people standing, mesmerised, in front of his works at the exhibition launch.
Danie Mellor: marru/the unseen visible continues at Queensland Art Gallery until August 3.