Art is for me a continuous and changing investigation into life. My art questions change and the dialectic of shape movement, time and form. Knowing I am in life, in the world not outside or above it I am constrained/helped by ability, but I abound with ideas which I present. I am drawn to abstraction and construction which came at a time when humanity questioned the very form of things. I give myself permission to move from installation to photography, to landscape to oil abstraction.

Always I am for class struggle, and the fight against oppressions, and the necessity of changing exploitation where a few people own and control nearly all the worlds wealth. Every time there are strikes and rebellion, and questioning, like there was in South Africa in 1976 where I was first involved and arrested in the Soweto uprising, and where last week women in Australia took to the streets, art surges, and life blossoms.

The neoliberal clamp down on art and uprisings leaves a gap unfilled. Art is a space that is not controlled, it can never be controlled. Although I struggle to say what I want in the way I want and often it is just colour mixed on a page or forms intersecting, always I am talking about freedom.

To open 2017 the VCA’s home page used my installation It is right to protest, a series of looping videos, I-phones  and I-pads, showing  protests, concentrating on individual aspects of feet moving, banners flowing, slogans, leaves on the ground, branches intervening. (below). And later by invitation I showed part of this exhibition at the Go Go Bar, Chin Chin Restaurant, in Flinders Lane. About the It’s right to protest Go Go Exhibition

Photographic cushions for our environment for exhibition Are you comfortable yet

#AlternatingCurrentArtSpace

Exhibition now closed.

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Melanie acknowledges the traditional custodians of the land on which  she works: the Wurundjeri people and Elders past and present of the Kulin nations. Land has never been ceded. Always was always will be aboriginal land.