ABOUT US
Pretty Weird Blueberry is an independent family art gallery representing three generations of Australian artists. We also consign significant Australian art and offer a rich artist-led cultural experience program.
Founded by established multi-disciplinary artist Melani du Jardin, the gallery brings together the work of Melani, her son Jim Scott, and her late father Ian R. Jardine — three distinct practices connected by family, landscape, artistic expression and a lifelong fascination with light.
At the heart of Pretty Weird Blueberry is a simple idea: art should retain the hand, eye and history of the artist who made it.
Everything offered through the gallery is either an original artwork, a carefully produced limited edition, or a curated and consigned original artwork with provenance by a significant Australian artist.
We are not a mass-production art business. When you acquire a work from Pretty Weird Blueberry, you are buying directly into the practice and story of the family of artists that created it as well as the larger tradition of Australian art.
Melani du Jardin — Painter, Draftswoman, Ceramicist & Photographer
Melani du Jardin is an Australian painter, draftswoman, ceramicist and photographer whose practice has developed across nearly five decades of drawing and painting and nine years of tertiary study across multiple arts disciplines.
Rooted in the Romantic and Impressionist traditions, her painting combines strong draughtsmanship with layered oil techniques, glazing, gestural mark-making and abstraction. Landscape is central to her practice, particularly the wild mountains, waterways and subtropical environments of eastern Australia, although her extensive body of work also encompasses portraiture, the figure, birds, photography and psychologically driven drawing and assemblage.
Her work frequently emerges from lived experience: landscape, memory, relationship, loss, survival and psychological inquiry become intertwined, with art functioning not only as representation but as a way of thinking, recording and making meaning.
Jim Scott — Photographer
Jim Scott represents the third generation of the family practice.
His photographic work explores light, landscape and automotive culture, with a particular interest in the way changing natural and artificial light transforms familiar subjects. His automotive photographs move beyond conventional documentation of cars, using reflections, architecture, colour, landscape and the fleeting light of dawn and dusk to construct highly considered images.
Alongside this work, Jim is developing a landscape and architectural practice informed by the same fascination with atmosphere and light.
Ian R. Jardine — Landscape Photographer
The late Ian R. Jardine photographed the Australian landscape during the 1970s and 1980s, travelling extensively through remote and Central Australia.
His archive records extraordinary landscapes and occasionally rare environmental events — from the great desert formations and waterways of Central Australia to Uluru surrounded by floodwater and Lake Eyre when full.
Only a small collection of Ian's photographic images survives today. Pretty Weird Blueberry is carefully bringing selected works from this archive back into view as limited-edition exhibition prints, preserving both the photographs and the eye of the photographer who made them.
Together, the three practices span different generations, technologies and ways of seeing.
A father photographed the Australian landscape.
His daughter became a painter, draftswoman and photographer.
Her son picked up the camera and began chasing light for himself.
Pretty Weird Blueberry is where those three stories meet.
Three generations. Original art. Made by artists.