Danie Mellor
The exhibition Proximity and Perception at the Cairns Art Gallery gave local audiences the opportunity to see work by acclaimed Australian contemporary artist Danie Mellor. The show included drawings1 and photography created during the past decade and was occasioned by the arrival of the gallery’s newly acquired drawing Dulgu-burra (a procession of history) (2018). Mellor, whose Indigenous heritage is Mamu, Ngagen and Jirrbal, regularly exhibits in large public institutions and respected commercial galleries in Australia and abroad, so Proximity and Perception was a rare opportunity for the artist to show his work in an institution in the region of his traditional Country of the Atherton Tablelands.
The exhibition is also an acknowledgement of the high esteem in which Mellor holds friend and mentor Dr Ernie Grant. The large portrait of the Jirrbal elder, Untitled (Ernie Grant in Blackman Street) (2006) was hung inside the doorway of the exhibition space, fittingly opening proceedings. Ernie Grant is an important figure in Mellor’s cultural and spiritual journey and the artist has been spending time with him learning about Country for over fifteen years. The portrait of Grant was the first of Mellor’s works to be acquired by the Cairns Art Gallery and is the earliest work in the exhibition.
Six of the eleven works in Proximity and Perception are mixed media drawings on paper. Apart from the large portrait drawn in pencil and charcoal, the other works on paper have blue landscape backgrounds with humans and animals depicted in full colour, with the exception of Above and below (2016) in which the figure of an Aboriginal man is also rendered in blue tones. Mellor uses his own photographs, historical images and vistas