photo credit: Melanie de Ruyter

With an empathetic brush, Melanie McCollin-Walker captures places and perspectives that uncover our own finitude. The Barbados-born artist has always been drawn to the sincerity, and serenity, of wild landscapes. After relocating to Tasmania several years ago, she has been exploring the island’s rich primordiality – its rugged beauty, clarity of light and atmosphere. Through countless layers, her paintings replicate the transformative and transcendent tenor of natural landscapes, positing them as benevolent guides to inward reflection and self-discovery.

McCollin-Walker’s new collection of paintings and charcoal drawings, 'As If Time Stood Still', charts a recent journey through one of the most isolated places in Australia – the Savage and Pieman Rivers on Tasmania's far North-West coast. She explored the river system by Kayak, a solitary journey surrounded by the temperate rainforest of the Tarkine region. It is here, in the temporal limbo of this ancient outdoor cathedral, that the artist found a greater grasp of time – not only how it helms her daily life, but how time is the motor and motivator of humanity. A paradoxical epiphany, indeed, in a place where time stood still, where days on the river unfurled in a hypnotic continuum. “In the stillness of time, I feel more centred and connected to everything around me…and it is then that I can truly start to see,” she reflects. The landscape eternal is captured by revolving, and evolving, visual interplays of the trees and the river. Our eyes amble into the metaphysical depths of the river, where undulating foliage and melancholy skies ripple across its reflective surface in abstract inversions of the land. As our gaze slides across this crystalline skin to the silent assembly of trees, and back again, we glimpse the infinitely large and the infinitely small. There is something there, in this place of fleeting and forever, something unshakeable and unutterable. Invisible horizons lure us deeper into the landscape, and by some strange magnetism we find ourselves ingested into a heart of darkness, and light. The perimeter of the canvas dissolves and we are one with the scene. And yet, a certain ontological distance underpins these works, an ineffable foreignness that points to the evolving chasm between modern man and the ancient land.

In the tradition of Tonalism, misty waterways and shadowy forests hold tightly secrets of the natural world – secrets, which, our ears are not attuned to hear. Though the works are uninhabited by humans, the viewer is palpably present, drifting through these point-of-view vignettes in the seat of the artist. Each vista is sifted through McCollin-Walker’s eyes, and yet there is the sense that the land is watching us. Quietly, patiently. We are inescapably on view, diminutive against the sublime. Aisles of omniscient trees bend inwards while the sky opens up like a cleft in the forest, cascading silver light onto the water in reflective splendour. Every now and then the forest whispers and the water sighs, exhaling a long primordial breath flushed with the unseen forces upon which life itself is built. At times it feels as though the land is quivering, fearful for its future in an Anthropogenic age, but mostly it seems almighty, deific even, a prodigious presence too immense for us to truly take in.

In some works, the viewpoint shifts upwards to reveal a serrated frontier between the gestural treetops and soft gradations of clouds. Though masterfully rendered in McCollin-Walker’s photorealistic style, these views appear abstract – cleaved into masses of form and tone competing – or courting – on the canvas. There is something sensorial about the scenes, somatic even, as the cashmere sky rubs up against the brisk, brambly foliage. A similar evocation is felt in McCollin-Walker’s monochromatic drawings, where the softness of the charcoal conjures the nostalgic contours of memory. These places speak to us from some distant past, plays of darkness and light teasing concealment and revelation.

​

Transcending spatial and temporal bounds, the works in this series are portals to worlds near and far. They feel at once embryonic and ancient, existing in a suspended state of eternal unfolding – as if time stood still.

​

essay by Elli Walsh, 2022

​