Melinda Jane is an Australian visual artist based in Castlemaine, central Victoria. She uses drawing, printmaking, collage and painting to explore the intimate relationship between self and the natural world where she lives. Her ability to connect with the vulnerability, the stillness and the simple beauty of the natural world through her sensitive artwork, invites others to sit in this sacred space of intuition and presence in an authentic and humble way
Melinda is attracted to shapes in nature, and it is common for her to take 100s of photos of the minutiae of the natural world when she is in a new place. It is the details she is drawn towards: the lines on a beach stone, the pattern made by the ocean as it ebbs on the sand, the crooked, gnarled shape of a near dead tree, the tessellated surface of granite rock, the mosaic of leaves on a forest floor, the shaft of light between two giant boulders as well as the boulders themselves.
She builds up the sensory experience and evocative recollection of these shapes and forms, and the responses that they give rise to.
In her studio, these shapes reveal themselves, dynamically, through the cutting of paper and the layering of colour. Through the held memory they come to life again in a new form. This interchange of experience, memory and creative reply becomes a dance, a call and response, a reciprocity of perception.
The shapes have a life force of their own. Melinda intuits the shapes as she cuts; the intention in the moment. The process is alive.
“I use art making as a way of connecting to both myself and with my surroundings; processing experience using artistic exploration to create motifs as a dialogue between environment, experience, interactions and moments of time.”
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