Six artists speak in March
4th March 2008
One of the most profoundly interesting aspects of collecting contemporary art is getting to know the artists.
Together with sheer physical talent, the success or otherwise of much contemporary art is heavily dependant on that otherness of the artist’s mind and creative intentions. How and what most contemporary artists think and how they see the world, may well be totally different from how you or I would most likely process the same information. It is this combination of talent and otherness of headspace that collectors acquire when collecting.
For when collecting the best of contemporary art you should actually be acquiring the work of a quality artist who describes the world in the first person”this is my life, this is my set of experiences, this is how I see things or, to put it more simply, this is my headspace.
Venue
Michael Reid at Elizabeth Bay, 44 Roslyn Gardens, Sydney
Tuesday 25th March”Danie Mellor, installation art, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, printmaking, doctor of philosophy
Danie Mellor is an established contemporary artist whose practice currently focuses on sculpture and printmaking. Danie already has an impressive number of works included in the collections of, amongst others, the National Gallery of Australia, Queensland Art Gallery and National Gallery of Victoria.
Danie has been invited to exhibit in the National Australian Indigenous Art Triennial, which will open in October 2007, coinciding with the Gallery’s 25th birthday celebrations, and will be on display for four months.
Danie’s Blue and White kangaroo series of sculptures take their inspiration from a blue and white glazed transferware design of two kangaroos on a plate, an engraving made by the Spode factory in England. The pair of kangaroos depicted had been taken from Australia to a European zoo to live and multiply as an exotic mob. As both specimens were male, a situation hardly conducive to the creation of new life, they failed to reproduce. The pair eventually froze solid one winter evening, dying a long way from their antipodean home.
In his sculptures Mellor explores the iconic role of the kangaroo. It forms part of our coat of arms and has been an important part of Indigenous culture both as totem and means of survival. The cute and furry is replaced by the harder edge of a mosaic of dinnerware, the Blue and White of the English ceramic factories. These sculptures suggest the fables of the exotic and fantastic, the Oriental and Other in faraway places, stories which were retold through the 18th century industrialized art forms of ceramics and transferware and which are now reworked once again by Mellor.
