WHEN the time came to lock in his final program for the Edinburgh International Festival, artistic director Jonathan Mills granted himself three indulgences. The energetic Australian composer, and former Melbourne Festival director, programmed a piece of his own music, Sandakan Threnody, written in honour of Australian and British prisoners-of-war in World War II. Mills also co-produced a new production of a play, Minetti, which will have three performances at the city’s Lyceum Theatre.
And, at the unlikely venue of Scotland’s National Museum, the director helped facilitate an exhibition of new drawings by Australian artist Danie Mellor.
Mellor has been a darling of the Australian art market for a few years now. At Art Basel Hong Kong in March, the entire collection of his pictures sold out during the so-called pre-market “vernissage”.
It was the same story at the inaugural Sydney Contemporary in September.
Mellor’s Brisbane dealer Jan Murphy says the artist is “at a really interesting time in his career”.
“As his works grow in scale and become more detailed in their subject matter and execution, he is attracting the interest of a more serious collector. Some may be attracted to the work from a purely aesthetic perspective, but Danie’s work offers so much more.”
Mills, via email from Edinburgh, describes Mellor as a friend and a talented artist who is distinctly Australian and yet also international.
“I have been wanting to make his presence felt in Edinburgh, particularly, because of his way of looking at the world, the way he mixes the colonial and the enlightenment periods,” Mills says.
It is rare for Australian visual artists to break out of the domestic market and enjoy international success, which is why, for example, Ben Quilty’s current exhibition at Saatchi Gallery in London — highlighted in a recent Review cover story — is such a notable achievement.
“(Mellor) is throwing back to Europe what Europe served to Australia in the 18th century in a witty and thoughtful way,” Mills says.
Mellor’s impending Edinburgh moment makes wonderful sense.
The tall and lanky, ginger-haired 43-year-old was born in Mackay to an Australian father with American heritage and a mother with Aboriginal (Mamu and Ngagen) and Scottish heritage. He spent his early years in Mackay, then Scotland, then Brisbane, but considers his mother’s ancestral country — the Atherton Tablelands — the inspiration for much of his work. His artist wife Joanne Kennedy is Scottish.
His works proving so popular with collectors depict the Queensland bush in finely detailed blue crayon sketches. The style is evocative of the quintessentially English Spode blue and white china often referred to as “transferware”. Scattered among his bush scenes are brown, almost sepia-toned figures of Aboriginal bushmen and women and native Australian animals.
WHEN Review rugs up for the journey, some 90 minutes from Sydney, to the artist’s home in the NSW southern highlands it finds Mellor and Kennedy in a light-filled A-frame house, surrounded by lush green trees and nestled on the side of an ancient, long dormant volcano.
Over tea and pastries around the square dining table at the heart of the couple’s home, the artist says the growing demand for his art is both a source of delight and fatigue.
“I’m logging very long hours,” he says. “There’s nothing else in life at the moment and I’ve taken a year off lecturing.”
Mellor has supported his art practice with an academic career he began at the Canberra school of art at the age of 24. He completed his PhD in colonial photography and taught full time at Sydney University’s college of the arts, reducing his workload only last year. Then he looked ahead at 2014 and realised something would need to give.
He’s chuffed about the Edinburgh show — it opened overnight and is a central part of the world’s most prestigious arts festival — but it very nearly didn’t happen.
The Edinburgh museum hasn’t made a habit of partnering with the long-established arts festival and as the small country gears up for its independence referendum on September 18 amid the goings-on in Glasgow for the Commonwealth Games, local cultural institutions have, understandably, been focused on the Scottish diaspora.
“It was becoming challenging to find a place to have a show (but) fortunately I had negotiated the sale of some of my work to the national collection,” Mellor says. He used an “in” to negotiate this show with help from Mills and his Sydney dealer Michael Reid.
Titled Primordial: SuperNaturalBayiMinyjirral, the exhibition of Mellor’s trademark blue sketches will reference items in the museum’s collection which is housed in the Romanesque revival building in the centre of Edinburgh. The national museum, which encompasses five campuses, is home to antiquities and natural history objects. It also celebrates science and only recently has embraced contemporary art, albeit in a deliberate fashion.
“It’s incredibly contemporary in the way they approach their collections and displays,” Mellor says.
“They’re beginning to exhibit more art and this is one of the earlier projects. In a way they’re testing the water with inviting artists.”
Mellor’s drawings respond deliberately to North Queensland objects in the museum’s collection.
“I’m incorporating that into the work I’m doing so there’s this relationship and correlation between objects and what I’m doing there,” he says. “There are connections which make the exhibition relevant.”
The indigenous figures Mellor depicts in his work are very unlike his urbane self. They are dark-skinned bushmen and women largely naked but for the occasional waistband.
When Mellor won the $40,000 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award in 2009, with an early blue and white rainforest sketch, it caught the attention of firebrand conservative columnist Andrew Bolt.
A few months earlier Bolt had singled out a group of white skinned Australians for overplaying their Aboriginality for political gain. Mellor wasn’t among the group, which included Bangarra Dance Theatre chairwoman, lawyer Larissa Behrendt, artist Bindi Cole, activist Geoff Clark and others.
After Mellor’s Telstra win, however, Bolt branded him “yet another white who chooses to be black”. Says Mellor: “I was a little surprised that my work was being written about because there had been no approach for comment. I thought it would have been an opportunity to discuss some of those things.”
After the Herald Sun published Bolt’s column Mellor wrote in response:
“It’s a fundamental error (usually a non-indigenous one) to mistake colour being a qualifier of Aboriginality (it’s a little 1950s to be honest). It’s more important to share knowledge and cultural and historical perspectives than it is to become a shrinking violet and hide, simply because someone has a go at your position.”
Mellor has taught contemporary indigenous art theory at university and has close connections with his family.
“My work isn’t that political but it has an underlying intent that can be political,” he says.
“I went up north towards the end of last year for a brief visit. Work commitments do mean it becomes challenging to balance time here and away.”
He’s still working out whether a return to teaching next year will be practical given exhibition commitments and his responsibilities with the Australia Council, where he is chairman of visual arts.
THE artist’s fascination with Spode has been in flight for many years. He has a sizeable collection and can talk at length about the dinnerware that has been through many incarnations since it was developed in 1770 by Josiah Spode in Stoke-on-Trent, England.
“One of the areas I focused on when I was young was print making,” he says. Spode’s exotic scenes led to its popularity, he says.
“It wasn’t so much the ceramics as the transferware and imagery spoke of this particular time in history where I guess the exotic far-off was something really quite interesting,” he says.
“People would come to an understanding of places through these engravings. It was a way of interpreting through dinnerware those far reaches of the empire.”
Interpretation and a degree of historical Disneyfication was part of the mix because Spode craftsmen — who were engravers rather than artists — worked from botanical and biological sketches to create what were essentially second-hand images.
Having examined colonial photography in his PhD, Mellor is deeply aware of the power and implications of the medium he relies on for his “obsessively detailed” sketches.
“I’m very interested in the way indigenous knowledge arises from ecology and environment, how to then have a discussion around the impact on knowledge and culture and also people,” he says.
And what of Mills, who has by now spent the best part of a decade living in Scotland? With the curtain having been raised last night on the 67th iteration of the world’s biggest arts jamboree, the Australian is in good company: Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and Geelong’s groundbreaking Back to Back Theatre troupe are there to join Mellor flying the flag for the country where Mills was raised.
Back to Back is an in-demand darling of the international festival circuit on account of the quirky and compelling nature of its work — its plays are largely conceived and performed by artists with Down’s syndrome. In Edinburgh they will present Ganesh vs. the Third Reich, a sprawling drama that has played in most Australian capital cities since its premiere at the Melbourne Festival in 2011.
MSO will play a program of Strauss, Schumann and Granger under the leadership of chief conductor Andrew Davis in an appearance sponsored by its media buyer chairman Harold Mitchell. Having delivered his eighth Edinburgh International Festival, Mills intends to continue living in Britain.
As for Mellor, he has his sights trained on the global market.
“There are shows mapped out in Australia and hopefully abroad, and I am in discussions with curators for institutional exhibitions for my work to be included in,” he says.
His Edinburgh series is also due to be repurposed and recomposed as huge photographic murals in Brisbane, to be installed over an epic 400sq m space along the walls of a public walkway on Queen Street in the CBD.
The individual works will be enlarged, tidied up, placed alongside each other and moulded to fit the space, creating a highly visible display of Mellor’s art in his former home town and an enduring link between it and Edinburgh.
