Jo Mellor

Jo Mellor is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher working on unceded Cammeraygal, Barkandji, and Gadigal Country. Her practice is grounded in socially engaged, ecofeminist activism, with a focus on collaborative relationships and the perception of Country. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from UNSW, where her thesis—guided by Ngiyampaa Elder Aunty Beryl Carmichael—explored care and comfort in an era of solastalgia through yarning, deep listening, and expanded textile practice. Mellor also holds a BFA (First Class Honours) from UNSW and a Fine Arts Diploma from Parsons School of Design, NYC. Her work spans textiles, installation, painting, and film, and has been exhibited in Australia and internationally, including a solo show in New York. Recent exhibitions include Cobalt and Rust at Woollahra Gallery, a critical exploration of ecological crisis on Wilyakali Country. Mellor’s work engages deeply with activism, land, and Indigenous knowledge systems through sustained, community-based collaboration.

In Broken Hill Cobalt Project, Wilyakali Country, Jo Mellor creates a fractal landscape. She digitally enhances a photograph of rusted mining machinery and prints it onto fabric. It’s then embroidered and hand-stitched. Her artwork is a response to the cobalt mine of Broken Hill, Wilyakali country, where the earth is dug up. Attracted to the healing properties of stitch, Mellor engages in the process of hand stitching to reimagine the landscape with the organic tracking of the crusts and layered patina of the rust. Adding to the incidental and organic growth that inevitably overcomes the scarred earth, scale becomes elusive – we see at once vast topographical mappings, as well as microbial universes. Either way, there is care and nurturing, a salve for the gaping scabs of the earth’s surface in the labour of hand-stitching. The cobalt blue colour is a homage to the mine site. Cobalt, in its mined state isn’t blue, but grey – extracted for its magnetic properties. By presenting the alchemic colour, Mellor plays with the symbolism of this colour – allowing us to imagine a bejewelled richness that may one day override this scarred and sacred landscape.