how do we locate ourselves within places shaped by centuries of movement and change? What do our ancestral homelands mean to us today, and how might we, as artists, audiences, and communities, continue to shape their meaning into the future?
What does it mean to return to a place you have never fully left? How do land, architecture, and memory shape who we are when our lives unfold across different geographies?
Heartlands brings together Jo Scicluna and Sean Meilak, two Melbourne-based artists whose Maltese heritage integrates through their artistic practice in distinct yet connected ways. This exhibition at Marie Gallery 5 is both an arrival and an unfolding, a moment where ancestral place, lived experience, and material histories are set in dialogue.
Malta itself is central here, not only as a homeland remembered through generations of migration, but also as a place marked by centuries of settlement, layering, and transformation. Its limestone cliffs, carved harbours, and baroque streets stand as witnesses to histories of departure and return, of crossings and continuities. To work in Malta as diasporic artists is to enter into this charged landscape and to reconfigure how belonging might be understood.
Scicluna approaches this through the shifting terrain of landscape. Her collages splice and fold together photographs of Australian coasts and Maltese rock formations, creating images that resist fixed orientation. They suggest that land is not a backdrop but an active participant in identity, capable of carrying memory, longing, and fracture. Her new series, Where the Land Remembers You, honours her late father’s yearning for Malta, suggesting that landscapes are not inert but active repositories of memory and belonging.
Meilak’s practice turns to built environments and archetypal forms. His ceramic and plaster works reference both familial craft traditions and the hybrid architectures of Malta, Melbourne, and antiquity. Alongside his drawings, they construct a language of forms that hold together the personal and the collective, the intimate and the monumental. His works ask: how do the structures we build -from homes to cities to cultural myths, shape our sense of place and self?
Together, Scicluna and Meilak’ works intersect landscape and architecture into a shared meditation on diaspora, displacement, and identity. Their practices refuse nostalgia or easy resolution. Instead, Heartlands opens a space where the place is understood as layered, unstable, and continually remade through memory, migration, and cultural exchange.
One can expect to encounter works that unsettle as much as they affirm: collages where horizons collapse and reform, sculptures that carry craft and history, and drawings that trace new paths between the known and the imagined.
Heartlands is a proposition. It asks: how do we locate ourselves within places shaped by centuries of movement and change? What do our ancestral homelands mean to us today, and how might we, as artists, audiences, and communities, continue to shape their meaning into the future?
About the artists:
Sean Meilak’s practice spans sculpture, installation, painting, drawing and art in the public realm. His work layers place and identity through personal and collective histories, drawing from his Maltese and Italian ancestry and referencing a wide range of aesthetic movements, recontextualised in a language of abstract and architectural forms, taking a metaphysical approach to create new narratives and intersections. Meilak’s work often reflects the diasporic experience combining traditional and contemporary materials and techniques such as the Baroque plaster technique of scagliola and those of the everyday to explore his ancestral connections and western suburban Melbourne upbringing. In 2024 Meilak these connections took form in his installation, Set Pieces in the inaugural Melbourne Sculpture Biennale: The Burden of Objects, Villa Alba, Melbourne. Meilak’s visual art practice has expanded to deliver art in the public realm including a large-scale sculptural installation Made for Melodrama 2022, for Beyond the curated section of the Melbourne Art Fair 2022 and Pastel Pools - Public Art commission ACU Melbourne in 2023.
Dr Jo Scicluna is a Naarm-based artist, completing her PhD (Fine Art) at Monash University in 2021. Through a critically engaged, site-responsive lens and a socio-cultural emphasis, Scicluna’s ongoing research explores expansive material and conceptual approaches to photographic landscape practice. Drawing upon her experience as a first-generation, settler-colonial Australian, and the cultural complexity this entails, Scicluna’s photo-sculptural works reconceive and recast the landscape surface as a productive interface through which to draw out, work with and counter the unresolved tensions underlying colonised lands. Her most recent practice is grounded in multiple invitations to respond to large-scale regions and municipalities to produce large scale commissions such as Where The River Takes Us (City of Banyule, 2024) and Where The Land Lies (Gippsland Art Gallery, 2019) developed in conversation with Traditional Custodians. Shortlisted in multiple national awards and winning the Brother McCarthy Award for Works on Paper in 2022 (Omnia Art Prize) and Excellence in Conceptual Photography Prize (CCP) in 2014, her works are held in private and public collections across Australia.
Dr Jo Scicluna is a Naarm-based artist, completing her PhD (Fine Art) at Monash University in 2021. Through a critically engaged, site-responsive lens and a socio-cultural emphasis, Scicluna’s ongoing research explores expansive material and conceptual approaches to photographic landscape practice. Drawing upon her experience as a first-generation, settler-colonial Australian, and the cultural complexity this entails, Scicluna’s photo-sculptural works reconceive and recast the landscape surface as a productive interface through which to draw out, work with and counter the unresolved tensions underlying colonised lands. Her most recent practice is grounded in multiple invitations to respond to large-scale regions and municipalities to produce large scale commissions such as Where The River Takes Us (City of Banyule, 2024) and Where The Land Lies (Gippsland Art Gallery, 2019) developed in conversation with Australia’s Traditional Custodians. Shortlisted in multiple national awards and winning the Brother McCarthy Award for Works on Paper in 2022 (Omnia Art Prize) and Excellence in Conceptual Photography Prize (CCP) in 2014, her works are held in private and public collections across Australia.
Sean Meilak’s practice spans sculpture, installation, painting, drawing and art in the public realm. His work layers place and identity through personal and collective histories, drawing from his Maltese and Italian ancestry and referencing a wide range of aesthetic movements, recontextualised in a language of abstract and architectural forms, taking a metaphysical approach to create new narratives and intersections. Meilak’s work often reflects the diasporic experience combining traditional and contemporary materials and techniques such as the Baroque plaster technique of scagliola and those of the everyday to explore his ancestral connections and western suburban Melbourne upbringing. In 2024 Meilak these connections took form in his installation, Set Pieces in the inaugural Melbourne Sculpture Biennale: The Burden of Objects, Villa Alba, Melbourne. Meilak’s visual art practice has expanded to deliver art in the public realm including a large-scale sculptural installation Made for Melodrama 2022, for Beyond the curated section of the Melbourne Art Fair 2022 and Pastel Pools - Public Art commission ACU Melbourne in 2023.