The sculptures, installations and films of Australian artist Mel O’Callaghan are environmental and architectural representations that draw on a notion of desertion and fusion with atmospheric and natural elements. Through their system, these elements evoke the human being, often absent, or overcome by his environment. By reproducing these phenomena, the artist draws our attention to those events that often go unnoticed in their own right, but are noticed and felt through their repercussions. Here, it is the conceptual and poetic potential of our environment that is made visible. In landslide, Mel O’Callaghan presents an installation reproducing a natural phenomenon in its cyclical and spatial temporality. The space of the gallery is invaded by an atmospheric turbulence; although invisible and immaterial, this turbulence fills the space, rendering it opaque, and ultimately creating a feeling of perdition as a result of the unknown that it arouses. Despite its intangibility, the matter takes on a sculptural density and creates a new dimension within the space.

Mel O’Callaghan plays on the fragility of the matter and the power of its effects, although it is of course non-matter, colourless and almost invisible but also impalpable and unlimited in the forms it can take. This shifting sculpture is also indeterminate in its temporality, growing via a process of expansion in the space and through the matter’s intrinsic potential for regular and irregular movements.

A second installation revisits the visual principle of nomadic tents. Yet the lines of this temporary, mobile, adjustable dwelling find an analogy with the silhouette of mountain tops, alluding to its volumes and contours. Mel O’Callaghan uses the potential of the taut canvasses to create variations in shape and a state of uncertain stability that postpones a notion of rupture. The properties of the matter are utilised and pushed to their limits in a play-off between the changing and the immutable.

In the artist’s latest film the camera follows the contours and muted colour of a vast and treacherous environment where a figure - apparently lost in this boundless space - can be seen. Unnarrated, the figure’s seemingly random movements are lost in the infinite environment in which he finds himself but which somehow eludes him. Nature, bleak although peaceful, is ultimately impregnated with the human condition that it encompasses and remodels continually.

In Mel O’Callaghan’s work, a slow process of change, stretched out in time and space, emerges as a revealer of material substance, showing the instability of form, but also a cyclical constancy in the transition from one state to another. The human element is all but absent, although present metaphorically through the internal systems of these kinetic works.

The viewer observes these phenomena within the exhibition space, but, while he experiences them, he is not subject to the consequences of the interaction between a natural force and the human will to control nature. Despite the monumentality of these works, a certain intimacy is established between the spectator and the piece recapturing the model of the human condition: unstable and in a permanent state of flux.