Artist Profile — Brett Mallon
Brett Mallon is an Australian artist who grew up on Quandamooka country (The Redlands), on the outskirts of Meanjin (Brisbane), Queensland, Australia. He currently resides on the Sinixt, Ktunaxa, Secwepemc and Sylix Okanagan territories of interior British Columbia, Canada. His practice is grounded in drawing and explores abstraction, spirituality and nature.
Brett has exhibited consistently over Australia and Canada since completing his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Printmaking at Melbourne’s RMIT University in 2018. He is currently undertaking his Master of Fine Arts at Emily Carr University in Vancouver. His work can be found in collections at Melbourne’s RMIT University, Western Australia’s Curtain University, Canberra’s National Art School and Queensland’s USQ Toowoomba. He has been the recipient of the Arts Law Pro Bono Print Commission (2018), winner of the ‘Open Bite’ Queenscliff Gallery Graduate Award (2018), finalist in the Peebles Print Prize (2019) and the Brisbane Portrait Prize, Salon Des Refuses (2020, 2022, 2024). In 2022, Mallon also attended the NG Art Creative Residency in Provence, France.
“My practice is based on site-specific projects that explore how I, as a European settler, may connect spiritually with the landscape through painting. My Russian, Irish and English ancestors had pre-Christian pagan religions, however none of them arrived in Australia with stories, or myths that connected them to the land. Even if they did, stories were not passed down through the generations. My work explores this disconnection via embodied experiences on land. Painting, walking, sitting, watching, listening help me build a relationship with place. Local stories and histories play an important role in this process as they combine with direct experience to help me learn from the spirit and history of the land that I reside on. Currently, I am spending time along the Sn̓x̌wn̓tkwítkw (Swift River/Columbia River), in Revelstoke, BC where I live. I was intuitively drawn to a place that sits along swift river where I became interested in the life that the river gives to the earth around it. Returning to this place multiple times a week, over many months, I have slowly begun to build a history and relationship with this place. Over time, a visual language has formed that expresses personal feelings, experiences, and memories of the area. Colour, line, and shape play an important role in translating this relationship. Each element coming together to express the unexplainable, and overwhelming feelings I experience when observing the beauty of nature in a place I have come to love”. - Brett Mallon
