PUBLICATIONS

The Palette of Place

Jo Mellor’s Cobalt and Rust and Natalie O’Connor’s The Nature of Redness conjure colour from the earth, inviting us to consider the history and character of pigment and its connection to land.

Exhibition 21 March - 14 April 2024

Essay by Josephine Morrow

Our perception of colour, in scientific terms, is a function of light. For Jo Mellor and Natalie O’Connor, their artistic interrogations have shown them that colour is also inextricably linked to place. It has layers, shifting and imaginative properties that link people to the land, testifying to the evolution of time, and the intervention and interactions, at times intrusive, of those who inhabit the earth and plumb its depths. 

Jo Mellor’s artistic practice is about tactility of surface. Tangible and bold, colour is a living thing, at once destructive and beautiful. In Cobalt and Rust, Mellor creates fractal landscapes, digitally enhanced photographs of rust printed on to fabrics that are then embroidered and hand-stitched in eye-popping technicolour. Her work is a response to the cobalt mine of Broken Hill, Wilyakali country, where the earth is dug up and left with cauterised and corrosive wounds. Attracted to the healing properties of stitch, Mellor engages in this careful and time-consuming process to reimagine the landscape with the organic tracking of the crusts and layered patina of the rust. Adding to the incidental and organic growth that inevitably overcomes the scarred earth, the embellished lines dance across the work’s surface. Scale becomes elusive – we see at once vast topographical mappings, as well as  microbial universes viewed in microscopic detail. Either way, there is care and nurturing, a salve for the gaping scabs of the earth’s surface in the labour. The intense cobalt blue of the digitally printed fabrics is, of course, a poetic homage to the mine site. Cobalt, in its mined state isn’t blue, but a dull grey – extracted and manipulated for its magnetic properties. By presenting the alchemic colour of cobalt, Mellor plays with the meaning and symbolism of this precious colour – allowing us to imagine a bejewelled richness that may one day override this scarred and sacred landscape.

In The Nature of Redness, Natalie O’Connor sets up glass vessels lined with paper and filled with a solution of red pigments and water. The gallery space becomes a laboratory in which O’Connor seeks to interrogate and distill the very essence of colour. Over time, the pigments leach onto the paper, leaving a trace, like an ebbing tide, or an errant and sometimes elusive signature. For O’Connor, red is the most propelling of colours; an ancient pigment, sacred across time and culture, associated with ritual, power, life and death. Her practice, therefore, is at once clinical and passionate, calibrated and energetic, as she tries to capture and chronicle the depth and breadth and indeed the very nature of the red pigments. Like Mellor, O’Connor’s artistic pursuit is inextricably linked to land. Having made several expeditions to the remote and ancient plains of Mungo, a place where the earth is literally immersive - underneath and at times airborne - O’Connor has experienced at once the durability and transience of the earth’s redness; the concealing and revealing with the wind and shifting light of its deep strata. Colour is in the earth, layered to its core. Here, the geological tides speak of the birth of life itself, fleetingly revealing the most ancient of reds in the deepest layer of earth. For O’Connor, the privilege of sitting on the Gol Gol ground and touching and tracing the transient, all-time trajectory of the landform may have brought her closer to glimpsing the elusive spirit and nature of the pigment that fascinates her so much.

Though their artistic responses to the land and to colour differ, both Mellor and O’Connor see their work as the product of a fundamentally collaborative process. Engaging with the land means engaging with the Aboriginal communities and Elders to whom it belongs. These encounters and experiences of hospitality and shared stories enliven the process of discovery, of unearthing and revisiting. Their work has evolved with these encounters and is testament to life changes, shared stories, personal narratives and a deep willingness to learn. The outworking for each artist reflects a pilgrimage of sorts; a documentation of a life journey as well as expedition to site, hovering in the intersection of time, place and the imagination.

Cobalt and Rust and The Nature of Redness will be exhibited at Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf. Opening night is Wednesday March 20th 2024.