Review

Upon entering, Melinda Giblett's first solo exhibition audiences feel calm. Beckoning is a quiet show in the sense that a Vermeer painting is quiet, and like a 17th century Dutch painting Melinda’s artworks are both deeply personal and universal. We are invited or should I say, beckoned into spaces and images that are curiously familiar, places we somehow remember.

I was first drawn to the Memory Vessels, a series of small works on plywood portraying domestic objects from a past time. Each work is a photographic collage where the images slip effortlessly between the real and dreamlike. Melinda tells me these were objects, memories and views from the house of her grandparents, a place she loved. The objects in each square are composed in a considered and gentle manner where the blurring of the medium is slightly disorienting, reminding me of Gerhard Richter's early paintings.

Audiences are drawn into the second room of Beckoning where the viewpoint lures us outside. A series of light box works display restored digital photographs of scenes familiar to any viewer over the age of forty where we are again ‘beckoned’ to glance past the figures to Melinda’s beloved Illawarra region. The artist has purposely cropped the original photographs adding to our searching exploration of each scene. 

Beckoning  is a show with a slow build as we make our way to the very large landscape (oil on linen) portraying the calm before the storm in a truly passionate and romantic expanse of the Illawarra sky.

Beckoning is a beautifully polished show where the homemade or analogue is delicately combined with a high level of technical skill. Melinda suggests that her observations reveal the role of the photographic image in the formation of recalled events and in the harnessing of memory around the profundity of joy, grief and loss. This is indeed evident as Beckoning provides each viewer with a space to contemplate and remember.

Words: Sue Salier- September 2018