Danie Mellor : dirran: at the edge of the forest

dirran: at the edge of the forest is an exhibition of new and recent works exploring landscape and history, memory and relationship. Through painting, photography, and moving image, Danie Mellor reimagines historical records and their visible remnants, blending archival and contemporary sources as recomposed and captivating, often haunting scenes.

‘dirran’ translates as ‘forest edge’ in the Dyirbal language of Mellor’s matrilineal ancestors and for him suggests a space of environmental difference and change, a subliminal threshold evoking magical possibility.

Central to Mellor’s practice is landscape and Country—and its documentation—at the intersection of history, experience, and understanding. His imagery embraces multifaceted understandings of land and place, where contrasting narratives coexist alongside spiritual dimensions, ancestral influences, and enduring Aboriginal connections to place. It envisions a convergence of past, present, and future, acknowledging our shared experience in evolving cultural landscapes.

Mellor’s works offer a space of remembrance and dialogue between painted and photographic images—a construction and disclosure that, as Susan Sontag once observed, is inherent to both mediums. In his recompositions of colonial-era imagery that evoke a deliberate nostalgia, Danie reassigns agency, restoring connections to land and ancestors.

Archival photography has indelibly shaped Mellor’s relationship with imagery. A rich family collection, including carte-de-visite portraits of several generations of his maternal Aboriginal grandmothers taken in the photographer Alfred Atkinson’s Cairns studio, has inspired sustained research into the lasting impact of images. Repurposing works by late-19th-century anthropologists and photographers such as Atkinson, he creates compositions that evoke real yet imagined spaces. In his paintings and imagery, Danie recreates these archaeological layers of history, the resulting mises-en-scène appearing as authentic reproductions that challenge our readings of historical photographs, and the interactions between people depicted in the work.

Drawing from personal and wider histories, Mellor crafts nuanced narratives amid tragedy and disruption. His detailed works focus on intimate human interactions, exploring emotional undercurrents in unseen encounters between individuals, their relationships, and surrounding landscapes. By offering ambiguity in the work, he prompts viewers to draw on their own memories, reshaping understandings of history.

Mellor seeks to reveal the invisible essence of the landscape, capturing visceral responses to primordial rainforests that stir profound inner awakenings. To make the hidden visible, he uses infrared photography, the detection of invisible light symbolically, or perhaps materially, unveiling spaces of memory, spirit, and Dreaming. His approach documents ancestral presence and ancient histories, evidence of prior existence and continuous life in an otherwise concealed realm of knowledge and phenomena.

Dark Star Waterfall, a significant new video work and Mellor’s first in this medium, reflects on elemental forces and vast rainforest expanses. The ‘dark star’, an early astronomical term for black holes, provides a symbolic connection through the irresistible pull towards waterfalls and the ‘fall’ of water. The precipice and edge of a waterfall is for water what the event horizon of a dark star is to light and matter: at a certain point inescapable. Waterfalls located in traditional Ngadjon and Mamu Country on the Atherton Tablelands were filmed using infrared and visible light cameras, the moving imagery extending Mellor’s use of still photographs as a symbolic means of disclosure and revelation.

Several audio sequences in the film are based on sonifications of astronomical data (including infrared light) converted into audible tones of Sgr A* (Sagittarius A*), the supermassive black hole at the centre of our Milky Way. This reference to astronomical data reinforces the connection of ‘local’ cosmology to the video and the Milky Way as a place of origin and habitat of the rainbow serpent, emphasising the significance of Yamani and its centrality in Aboriginal rainforest legends of landscape and creation.

Danie Mellor has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally, with major solo shows including marr u | the unseenvisible at QAGOMA (2025), Danie Mellor at Campbelltown Arts Centre (2024), and the survey exhibition Exotic Lies Sacred Ties at the University of Queensland Art Museum, touring to Tarrawarra Museum of Art and the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (2014). His work has been presented in landmark international projects such as Primordial: SuperNaturalBayiMinyjirralat the National Museum of Scotland during the Edinburgh International Festival (2014).

Mellor has also been featured in leading biennales and museum exhibitions including the NGV Triennial (2023), the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art (2016), the 8th Asia Pacific Triennial at QAGOMA (2015), the unDisclosed National Indigenous Art Triennial at the National Gallery of Australia (2012), Sakahàn: International Survey of Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Canada (2013), and Australia at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (2013).

Danie Mellor’s work is held in major public, private, and corporate collections both nationally and internationally. These include the National Gallery of Australia, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, the British Museum, the National Gallery of Canada, and the National Museums Scotland, as well as the Fondation Opale in Switzerland. His work is also represented in leading Australian state institutions such as the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Art Gallery of South Australia, the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, and the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, along with the New Parliament House Art Collection and the Wesfarmers Collection. Mellor’s work is further represented in numerous regional galleries and university collections across Australia, and he has received multiple awards and public commissions throughout his career.