Biography

Melanie McKee was born in Harare, Zimbabwe and immigrated with her family to Perth, Western Australia in 2001. She has undertaken study in the Fine Arts at Curtin University, graduating with First Class Honours in 2011. Melanie completed an international study exchange program at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts de Paris in 2008-09. She has been heavily involved with the Perth Centre for Photography and has undertaken sessional teaching at Curtin University in 2013. Melanie has exhibited both locally and internationally, and is currently a PhD candidate at Curtin University in Western Australia.

Illustrated Talk

Printmaker as Explorer: Navigating a course through memories of Marston Farm
This paper seeks to plot a course through the ways in which a home can be remembered via printmaking.  In this instance the artist is the metaphorical explorer of a homestead, located within a Zimbabwean agricultural landscape and community.  Marston farm, home to the maternal side of my family for half a century is now unattainable to us after Marston was redistributed under Zimbabwean land reform policies in the 2000s.  My creative practice focuses on a place familiar to me yet is now inaccessible and exists only in memory. In this sense my prints seek to map the unknown, to visualize the invisible, imparting memories and stories of Marston to an unacquainted audience.  By combining print processes with plain and decorative sewing techniques specific to Marston my printmaking practice attempts to draw an audience into my ‘memory house’, telling the story of a home through print.

Beyond a conversation or written description the print can lend a visual appreciation of Marston homestead.  With the addition of sewing (a practice learnt from my grandmother) my prints achieve deeper resonance with Marston though physical engagement with the narratives of this place and memory of home.  This physical processing of the art object will be discussed in collusion with Nadia Seremetakis’ theories on artifacts and material culture as memory forms.  To this end the paper references prints that integrate material culture within and around the homestead, and the activities that are linked in my memory to Marston. In addition, the theories of Gaston Bachelard and Alison Blunt support my understanding of home, memory and material culture.  Printmaking has been a means of my recollecting home and through which I invite others to explore the ‘memory house’ of Marston.