Melody Spangaro
Doncaster East, VIC
Melody Spangaro is an Australian artist who explores landscapes and reflects on our deep connection to nature and its fragile beauty.
Message
Melody Spangaro is an accomplished Melbourne/Naarm-based artist with an established drawing practice. Best known for her large-scale, monochrome landscape works, Melody's practice has evolved over the years. She started with monochrome landscapes, exploring the emotional and cultural relationships we hold with the environment, foregrounding the tension between ecological tragedy and aesthetic beauty. However, her recent works have taken a more intimate, colourful turn, marking a new direction in her practice. This series, inspired by her travels, is rich with warmth, light, and personal connection. These paintings retain her signature sensitivity while inviting a softer, more internalised reflection on our engagement in the natural world.
Rooted in early experiences of outdoor exploration, her art draws deeply from childhood memories of bushland, coastal dunes, and Australia's diverse natural environments. These recollections form the emotional and conceptual backbone of a practice that delicately balances the sublime with the precarious, inviting contemplation and introspection. Her works respond to the beauty of untouched landscapes while grappling with their vulnerability in the face of habitat destruction and environmental degradation.
Statement
The Burning World: Melody Spangaro
For what seems forever, enormous, bold, what even may be described as ‘heroic,’ drawing seemed to have been the domain, in Australia at least, of such male artists as Mike Parr and the late Bernhard Sachs. With the advent of the colossal works of Melody Spangaro that is, quite clearly, no longer the case.
But it is not just scale that may awe us with Spangaro’s works. It is also theme, which in her case is just as audacious. In scale one can become immersed, as in viewing her 2023 work, Woolshed Falls which, at 152 x 855 cm is almost ridiculously ambitious. But in theme she takes on the world, the environment and our simply idiotic role in it as homo sapiens. Beginning with a very basic love of the natural environment, fed and abetted by childhood memory and a vivid imagination, Spangaro is not immune to a spring of romanticism.
But then she burns it down. Not of her own violation mind you.
The forest, the jungle, the ocean. These are sites of desecration, places of pillage for a particular species. Humankind. And Spangaro wants us to face the desolation we wreak.
“I find myself grappling to navigate the paradox of having an environmental agenda and art practice dependent on materials while living within socio-political systems that cause irreversible damage to the planet,” Spangaro told Chantal Boynes. “My drawings are pictorial representations of seeing, sensing, and thinking created to document internal and external landscapes, driven by the desire to understand the current ecological crisis, the scale and complexity of which remain hard to comprehend.”
One would like to think of Spangaro’s more apocalyptic scenarios as illustrations for a dystopian science fiction story. But when one faces the twisted metal and charred remains in such works as A Burning Sense of Urgency-36.182147.781, despite the strange beauty they may evoke, they are illustrative of a potent reality.
Dr. Ashley Crawford