This Thursday 2nd October at 7pm, Marie Gallery 5 in Tigné, Sliema will open its doors to Heartlands, a thought-provoking exhibition by Melbourne-based artists Dr Jo Scicluna and Sean Meilak, produced and curated by Maria Galea.

Both artists share Maltese heritage, and through their distinct yet interconnected practices, they explore how land, architecture, and memory shape identity across geographies and generations. At the centre of their dialogue is Malta itself – an ancestral homeland layered by centuries of migration, settlement, and transformation.

In her series Where the Land Remembers You, Jo Scicluna blends photographs of Australian coastlines with Maltese rock formations, creating collages that defy fixed orientation. These works treat the land not as a backdrop, but as an active keeper of memory, longing, and loss. Dedicated to her late father’s yearning for Malta, the series positions landscape as a living archive of belonging.

Sean Meilak’s works draw on architecture and archetypal form, blending ceramics, plaster sculptures, and drawings. Referencing family craft traditions and the hybrid architectures of Malta, Melbourne, and antiquity, he creates a symbolic language that binds together the personal and the collective, the intimate and the monumental. His practice asks how the structures we build – from homes to cultural myths – shape who we are.

Together, Jo and Sean’s practices converge in a shared meditation on diaspora, displacement, and identity. Heartlands doesn’t offer nostalgia or easy answers; instead, it opens a space where place is understood as layered, shifting, and continually reshaped by migration and cultural exchange.

Does the exhibition’s theme of identity strike a chord with you?