QG Melbourne popup to present Susan Wald’s Mungo at fortyfivedownstairs

Named after this sacred piece of land, Susan Wald’s latest body of work records her personal feelings and responses to Mungo. Her monochromatic monotypes, sometimes coloured with ochres, browns and mauves, along with her paintings, are monumental in presence – the low vantage point from which Wald paints and prints making Mungo’s Mars-like terrain of sand and mud pinnacles seem larger than life itself. Somehow, with just a plate and some ink, with just a palette of paint, Wald both captures the historical gravitas of a place that marks the beginning of the Australian landscape and its people whilst also foreshadowing its dry, desolate and barren end.

‘These are pictures for our time. Pictures that are refined by time, they are thoughtful, and speak of death and birth in one. They speak of the end point of the Australian landscape, the dry, desolate, final images of one of the world’s driest continents.

Mungo is known worldwide as a place of discovery; of Mungo man, and Mungo woman, a marker that starts a chronology for our First Peoples.’

— Dr Thomas Middlemost, excerpt from opening speech – Mildura Arts Centre, 2020