melmo

Melanie Thewlis is a multimedia visual artist working in oil painting, digital printmaking and film. Originally intending to follow a path in the sciences, a long spell of illness at sixteen gave her plenty of time stuck in bed to read Robert Hughes’ seminal critique of modern art, ‘The Shock of the New’ from cover to cover.

Following the realization that she in fact wanted to be an artist, Melanie initially studied Visual Art at RMIT but felt she wanted to learn more about the world she lived in before she was ready to make art about it. With this in mind, she moved to Melbourne University to study arts.

After completing her Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Political Science and volunteer work with Victorian Indigenous communities, she commenced professional arts practice in 2009. Working across a range of media and drawing on contemporary thinking in the arts and sciences, Melanie’s work is nonetheless firmly grounded in a lifelong practice of representational drawing and the study of classical technique and composition.

In the last year, Melanie has exhibited work in Canada, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, rural Victoria and Adelaide, achieving significant success in being included as a finalist in the Prospect Portrait Prize and the Portia Geach Memorial Award, Australia’s premier portrait prize for female artists.

Melanie’s intellectual preoccupations include the limitations and nature of being human; selfhood at the extremes of the human condition; personal transcendence; our place in the universe; interpreting findings in physics, astronomy and evolutionary biology and revealing their beauty through visual art; and the intersection of the natural world and man made technologies.

Her work reflects on our fraught relationship with nature and technology. However, it is not her intention to present a dystopic vision that merely results in inertia and disillusionment with technology. Rather, she seeks to use the traditional medium of oil painting to create haunting and unsettlingly beautiful images of imaginary future worlds in which nature and technology have fused in surprising ways, in order that we may be inspired to search for the best possible relationship between the man made and the natural worlds.

Email: melanie@zubiandmelmo.net