MELANCHOLIA

Melancholy, the subject of our present discourse, is either in disposition or in habit. In disposition, is that transitory Melancholy which goes and comes upon every small occasion of sorrow, need, sickness, trouble, fear, grief, passion, or perturbation of the mind, any manner of care, discontent, or thought, which causes anguish, dulness, heaviness and vexation of spirit, any ways opposite to pleasure, mirth, joy, delight, causing frowardness in us, or a dislike. In which equivocal and improper sense, we call him melancholy, that is dull, sad, sour, lumpish, ill-disposed, solitary, any way moved, or displeased. And from these melancholy dispositions no man living is free, no Stoick, none so wise, none so happy, none so patient, so generous, so godly, so divine, that can vindicate himself; so well-composed, but more or less, some time or other, he feels the smart of it. Melancholy in this sense is the character of Mortality. . . . This Melancholy of which we are to treat, is a habit, a serious ailment, a settled humour, as Aurelianus and others call it, not errant, but fixed: and as it was long increasing, so, now being (pleasant or painful) grown to a habit, it will hardly be removed.

Robert Burton 1621. The Anatomy of Melancholia

An exhibition that draws upon work each touched with the melancholic – that state of brooding reflection, the close of day light and sense of solitary and mortality – a temperature that evokes a colour and sensation that is slow in its advance and complex in its ambush of our minds.

I want that the work charts something of the ebb and flow of this emotional state – from its beauty and dimension to its emptiness and reflectivity. Work that through its layering touches beauty, death, love and the evacuation of all these components.

– Andrew Jensen 2005