Danie Mellor

Mellor was born in Mackay, Queensland, in 1971. His father was of American and Australian descent; his mother had Irish, Mamu, Ngagen, and Ngajan heritage. Mellor's maternal great-great-grandmother, Eleanor Kelly, and great-grandmother, May Kelly, were Indigenous Australian people from the rainforest country around Cairns. The family was peripatetic: in his first twenty years, Mellor lived in Mackay, Queensland; Scotland; Brisbane, Queensland; Sutton Grange, Victoria; Adelaide, South Australia; and Cape Town, South Africa, as well as in the Northern Territory. Mellor went to school at Steiner Schools in South Australia and South Africa; in high school he was taught art by his mother. Looking back at the influence of his schooling upon his art, he remarked how, despite the Eurocentric origins of Rudolf Steiner's approach to education, "there are comparable elements and themes inherent in [Steiner's] philosophical narrative that parallel an Indigenous outlook, which is holistic in the way it approaches deeper and more intuitive readings of the environment and landscape." Mellor is married to artist Joanne Kennedy. ==Career==

In the early 1990s, Mellor won drawing prizes at the ANU's Canberra School of Art and the Grafton Regional Gallery in New South Wales. Through the mid-1990s, while studying in Canberra and Birmingham, he was represented in numerous student and other exhibitions, in Australia, Belgium, Japan, Korea and the United Kingdom. These included exhibitions titled Passage, at Kyoto Seika University in Japan in 1994, and Fragile Objects at the National Library of Australia in 1996. Subsequent entries have included Of fragile dreams the heart which nevermore in 2005, Untitled (Ernie Grant in Blackman Street) in 2006, Exotic lies and sacred ties (the heart that conceals, the tongue that never reveals) in 2008, and A Transcendent Vision (of life, death and resurrection) in 2010. Reviewing the 2008 exhibition, academic Sarah Scott expressed surprise that Mellor's 2008 piece had neither attracted an award nor been purchased for the Northern Territory's public collection. He has had numerous other exhibitions, both individually and as part of group shows, at galleries including the Queensland Art Gallery in 2003, the Canberra Museum and Art Gallery in 2006, and the Indigenous Ceramic Art Awards, at Shepparton Gallery in Victoria in 2007. The work featured in media reports of the exhibition, including by The Adelaide Advertiser, The Canberra Times, The West Australian and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Since graduating, Mellor has won several awards, including the Canberra Critic's Choice Award in 2006, and the $15,000 John Tallis National Works on Paper Acquisitive Award in 2008. The following year, he won the Victorian Indigenous Ceramic Art Award, held at Shepparton Art Gallery in Shepparton, Victoria. In August 2009, Mellor won the AU$40,000 National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award, for his mixed media work From Rite to Ritual. It was only the third time in the award's 26 years that an urban Aboriginal artist had been the winner. Earlier that year his solo show at Brisbane's Jan Murphy Gallery had sold out. Also in that year, Mellor's work was featured alongside that of Patricia Piccinini and Cherry Hood in the Newcastle Region Art Gallery's show Animal Attraction. Though Mellor has not had a painting hung in the Archibald Prize, he was the subject of Paul Ryan's portrait that was a 2010 finalist in that competition. In 2012, his work was included in the National Museum of Australia's exhibition Menagerie: Contemporary Indigenous Sculpture, and in the second National Indigenous Art Triennial. He was also selected for inclusion in that year's Blake Prize, with his work Bulluru Storywater. Mellor received international recognition in 2013, when he was included in Sakahàn, the National Gallery of Canada's "most ambitious contemporary art exhibition in its history". Among the national collections containing Mellor's work are the National Gallery of Australia, which owns his prize-winning From Rite to Ritual, and the Parliament House Art Collection. and Warrnambool Art Gallery in Victoria. as well as in large, private collections such as the Kerry Stokes. In 2011, Mellor was not an entrant in the National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award, as he instead became one of its judges. Appointed to the Visual Arts Board for a further term, Mellor in 2013 became its Chair. At the same time, Mellor continued to exhibit works. In 2014, a survey of his works opened at the University of Queensland Art Museum and was scheduled to travel to the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory later in the year. The exhibition was favourably reviewed in theguardian.com, with art critic Sharne Wolff drawing attention to Mellor's newest sculpture, Anima, which she said "marks a dramatic change" for the artist, bearing "no resemblance to Mellor’s more glamorous output". His work featured as part of the Edinburgh International Festival, with a show titled Primordial: SuperNaturalBayiMinyjirral displayed at the National Museum of Scotland. A large work of Mellor's, Entelekheia (2016), consisting of photographic images of plants etched in concrete, can be found on the exterior walls of the International Convention Centre in Sydney. ==Technique and themes==

Mellor's extensive scholarly art education has made his art have a strong theoretical base. When Sarah Scott considered the 2008 work Exotic Lies and Sacred Ties, which, like From Rite to Ritual, drew on evocations of Spode china, she highlighted its exploration of the history of cross-cultural relations. Noting the landscape that forms the central element of the painting, she observed: From Rite to Ritual examined relationships between Indigenous and settler cultures, including differences in spiritual practices. Mellor, in an artist's statement for the awards, described the work as showing "what is a moment of contact, a conversation and interaction between two cultures; it speaks of the challenges of settlement, and the differences in spiritual enactment and belief". Commenting on the work, the judges of the prize remarked that the "surprising scale and layering of imagery, with its understated political and historical references" made the work "outstanding" and of "great complexity and grace". Art writer Nicolas Rothwell described the work as drawing a parallel "between Aboriginal initiation rituals and the ceremonies inside a Masonic lodge." Mellor's earlier works examined the relationships between cultures, including in his mezzotint prints in which he juxtaposed "images of native and introduced flora and fauna—for example, a kangaroo with a bull—to symbolise two different peoples and cultures". Mellor's interest in cultural interactions extends beyond the making of his art. In a panel discussion on Indigenous art education, Mellor emphasised that, in teaching Indigenous art within visual arts, it was important to be aware of both Aboriginal and settler history, "so you can talk about their interaction and the whole set of issues that arise from those two things being parallel". Mellor's emphasis on past interactions between cultures led gallerist and critic Michael Reid to consider that Mellor's works had earned him "an important place in the visual narrative of Australian history". For Mellor, Indigenous identity is a theme highlighted in his work and (not necessarily by his own choice) in public life. As a fair-skinned man with blue eyes and caucasian features, his appearance has occasionally raised questions of "authenticity". Commentator Ellie Savage, criticising Bolt, wondered why someone who "neither draws in the dirt nor lives in it" should therefore have "no right to enter competitions for Indigenous artists". Bolt two years later lost a case brought by nine Indigenous Australians—not including Mellor—for racial discrimination over articles that criticised fair-skinned Indigenous people, including the post that had lambasted Mellor. Art writer Maurice O'Riordan, reviewing the 2009 Award, noted the Bolt controversy but pointed out that Mellor, while in early works acknowledging his Indigenous heritage, is not concerned with the definition of Aboriginality, but with historical interaction between cultures and the reimagining of history. ==Notes==