Heartlands: Maltese-Australian Artists Explore Land, Memory And Identity
Marie Gallery 5 has opened Heartlands, a joint exhibition by Melbourne-based artists Jo Scicluna and Sean Meilak, both of Maltese heritage. The show explores how land, architecture, and memory intertwine to shape identity across shifting geographies.
Malta sits at the heart of the conversation, not just as an ancestral homeland carried through generations, but as a place layered with centuries of history. Its limestone cliffs, carved harbours, and baroque streets become both inspiration and witness as the artists investigate belonging in a contemporary context.
For Jo Scicluna, the focus is landscape. Her series Where the Land Remembers You blends photographs of Australian coastlines and Maltese rock formations, creating collages that resist fixed orientation. Dedicated to her late father’s yearning for Malta, Scicluna positions land as a living archive, carrying memory, longing, and identity.
Sean Meilak, meanwhile, turns to architecture and form. His ceramic and plaster works, alongside drawings, draw on familial craft traditions and the hybrid architectures of Malta and Melbourne. His pieces explore how built structures, from homes to cities, shape our sense of place and self, merging the personal with the monumental.
Together, Scicluna and Meilak’s practices intersect to explore diaspora, displacement, and identity. The exhibition doesn’t rely on nostalgia but instead creates a space where place is layered, unstable, and continually remade through migration, memory, and cultural exchange.
Visitors can expect collages where horizons collapse and reform, sculptures carrying craft and cultural history, and drawings tracing new paths between the known and the imagined.
About the artists:
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Sean Meilak works across sculpture, installation, drawing, and public art, weaving personal and collective histories through his Maltese and Italian ancestry. His practice combines Baroque techniques and contemporary methods to explore diaspora and place, with recent projects including installations for the Melbourne Sculpture Biennale and Melbourne Art Fair.
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Dr Jo Scicluna is a Naarm-based artist and PhD graduate from Monash University. Her photo-sculptural practice is site-responsive and critically engaged, exploring landscape as a productive interface to unpack tensions in colonised lands. Her work has been recognised in national awards and is held in private and public collections across Australia.
Heartlands invites audiences to reconsider what ancestral homelands mean today, and how memory, migration, and cultural exchange continuously reshape our sense of belonging.
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