I acknowledge the Kaurna peoples of the Adelaide Plains and value their spiritual connections with Country. I respect their living cultural heritage and pay respect to Elders past, present and emerging.

Melanie Cooper is an interdisciplinary visual artist long preoccupied with exploring fluid and shifting spaces that lie between ideas, thoughts, action, and experience. Her work investigates and maps out interior and exterior spaces as anchor points that mark her own passage through time. Absorbing elements of urban and natural landscapes, remnants of place and fragments of thought are translated into the work as an intuitive exploration and manipulation of materials. Here, the physical process of painting, stitching and drawing mirrors the act of automatic writing where instinct and memory collide. Focused gestures of making embody the meditative labour of observance, rumination and performed remembrances. In this way, Melanie’s practice as reclamation becomes an active resistance to loss and oblivion in a process that simultaneously expands on her understanding.

As a graduate of the North Adelaide School of Art, Melanie completed both a Masters and PhD in Art History from the University of Adelaide. Exhibiting widely, Melanie's work is held in national and international collections. Melanie also continues a research and teaching practice and is currently teaching at both the Adelaide Central School of Art and Adelaide College of the Arts. She is currently serving as state representative for AAANZ (Art Association of Australia and New Zealand).

As an eighteenth-century specialist, her research interests are interdisciplinary and include representations of classical mythology, gender, sexuality, natural history and early modern evolutionism. She currently nurtures a growing fascination for censorship, iconoclasm and contemporary art practices.

More information on her practice as an art historian, educator, and writer can be found at: www.drmelaniecooper.com