Danie Mellor presents new ways of looking

Mon 2 Jun 2025

Danie Mellor’s multidisciplinary art practice explores Australia’s shared history through the lens of his Ngadjon-jii and Mamu ancestry, and his ongoing connection to Country in the Atherton Tablelands and rainforests of far north Queensland.

Watch | Danie Mellor introduces 'marru | the unseen visible'

‘Danie Mellor: marru | the unseen visible’ brings together works examining memory and remembrance; the relationship between First Nations people, culture and Country; and the environmental and social impact of colonial history. ‘marru’ translates as ‘becoming visible’ in the Dyirbal language of Mellor’s matrilineal ancestors. His recomposed scenes meld archival and contemporary source imagery, reimagining historical pictorial records through painting, photography and moving image. In doing so, Mellor presents new ways of looking and visualises the unseeable and unseen. His approach establishes a dialogue between photographic and painted images that examines the accepted authority of archival photography and the role images have in shaping collective perceptions of history and memory.

Country underpins Mellor’s explorations, positioning landscape, and the recording of landscape, at the nexus of historical narrative, experience and understanding. The artist compels audiences to reconsider the idea of landscape as ‘landspace’. This perspective offers an expanded reading of the historical canon of landscape, which often demonstrated possession or ownership, particularly through a colonial and settler lens. For Mellor, landspace encompasses complex and layered understandings, where different and even opposing narratives coexist. It recognises spiritual dimensions of the landscape, ancestral impact and presence, and continuing Aboriginal relationships with Country — visualising a space where past, present and future converge.

Danie Mellor: marru | the unseen visible
15 March – 3 August 2025
Queensland Art Gallery
Brisbane, Australia
Free entry