Melanie Cobham

Master of Contemporary Art

My work considers migration, colonisation, language and place, mapping the territories (both internal and external) that suggest belonging. After moving to Australia in 2019, and as migration became an increasingly tense subject in the face of the pandemic, I started thinking about more abstract ways to understand borders, identity and belonging.
For migrating individuals, presence is framed by the trail of documentation we leave behind. Appropriating and reinterpreting these documents has allowed me to question how the systems that bureaucratise identity have the potential to become abrasive and damaging.
Surveying landscape and language, my works manifest in the forms of drawings, prints, installations and weavings. They embody the fraught translations between the analogue and the digital, between gesture and image, between communication and misunderstanding.