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Danie Mellor

Jeremy Eccles
Eyeline 81
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The Sanctuary (savage legends of life in the rainforest), 2013. Pastel, pencil and wash on Saunders Waterford paper, 80 x 153cm. Private collection, Sydney.

2014 is an amazing year for artist Danie Mellor, with a major solo show, ‘Exotic Lies, Sacred Ties’, touring from the University of Queensland Art Museum (UQAM), Brisbane to the TarraWarra Museum of Art in Victoria’s Yarra Valley, to the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin, as well as his selection as the only Australian visual arts event of this year’s Edinburgh Festival. The Jan Murphy Gallery also featured Mellor at Art Basel Hong Kong—a marvellous and circuitous return of the blue and white Spode china imagery that has dominated his art since 2008, appropriated originally from Jingdezhen in China by the English ceramicists who developed transfer printing in the very same decade, the 1780s, that the English began to appropriate Australia.

But then it has also been an amazing decade of development on the part of Mellor, from my first encounters with his work at the National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAAs) in the early 2000s when, writing for the Canberra Times, I was always delighted to report on his solo representation from the Capital. His luscious mezzo-tints of the hearts of ferns reflected his close identification with the deep green rain-forests of the Atherton Tablelands from where the maternal side of his ancestry comes. He went on to win the Big Telstra prize at the 2009 NATSIAAs with an early example of the more intellectually complex blue and white works that are now taking him to the world.

That win challenged a few perceptions. For the tall, red-maned, blue-eyed Celt, Danie Mellor is not obviously Aboriginal. It is hard to see within him his Mamu, Ngagen and Jirrbal ancestors like ‘Little... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

L’Heure Bleue, 2014. Pastel, pencil and wash on Saunders Waterford paper, 153 x 253cm (diptych, lhs 153 x 100cm, rhs 153 x 153cm).

L’Heure Bleue, 2014. Pastel, pencil and wash on Saunders Waterford paper, 153 x 253cm (diptych, lhs 153 x 100cm, rhs 153 x 153cm).

The Shadow and the Breath (touching three worlds), 2014. Pastel, pencil and wash on Saunders Waterford paper, 240 x 153cm (vertical diptych, each panel 120 x 153cm), circular element 80cm diameter.

The Shadow and the Breath (touching three worlds), 2014. Pastel, pencil and wash on Saunders Waterford paper, 240 x 153cm (vertical diptych, each panel 120 x 153cm), circular element 80cm diameter.