During her travels Melinda Schawel developed a habit of trawling book stores and flea markets, unearthing bundles of old correspondence, most of which was in languages unfamiliar to her. She found these old forgotten letters and postcards to be poignant and unsettling, and inspiration for this recent body of works, ‘out of touch’. In an image saturated society Schawel’s works gives the viewer welcome relief with it’s subtle shifts of light and shape. There is a gentle melancholy to these paintings that echo the words and evoke the memories of long ago friendships.
When used as social or political statement text can often alter our experience of the visual arts. However, Schawel uses scraps of foreign text not only for it’s aesthetic qualities, but to create her own visual language, one that might serve as a bridge across cultures when words alone cannot.

“I was standing at the bus stop when an elderly woman approached and started chatting to me while I nodded and smiled in what I hoped were the right places. I
waited for a lull in the chatter to say ‘es tut mir leid, ich spreche nur ein bisschen Deutsch’, but it never came. The bus arrived a few minutes later, so we bid each other a fond farewell. I boarded in a daze wondering how I could actually participate in an exchange without contributing or understanding a single word.
It was one of many one-sided conversations I had when I fi rst arrived in Zürich in 2001. I wasn’t an obvious foreigner; my father’s roots are German and my mother’s Slavic/Polish. Learning the language would be intrinsic to understanding the culture in which I was now immersed. The gaps or slippages that occur in the learning process, both between and within cultures, is the current focus of my work - what is misinterpreted, misunderstood or simply left unsaid.”
Melinda Schawel 2006

Born in Illinois, USA, Melinda Schawel received a BA in Fine Art and Communication from the University of California Santa Barbara in 1993 and a Postgraduate Degree in Printmaking from RMIT in 1996. She has exhibited regularly since 1995 and has been selected for a number of prestigious commissions including the Westin Hotel and the Park Hyatt. Her work has been published by Murtra Edicions in Spain and is represented in numerous collections including the National Gallery of Australia and the Royal Museum of Fine Art, Antwerp, Belgium. This is her second solo exhibition at Flinders Lane Gallery.