Last week I completed an artist residency at the Glasshouse in Port Maquarie
What is an artist residency you ask? Hopefully this post can answer that question and also give some insight into what I did during my residency.
Celebrating colour in leaves
It's no secret that I like leaves.
In fact I like leaves more than that I like flowers, which probably makes me a bit weird because I am sure it is the other way around for most people. Leaves have inspired my work for the last few years and I can't look at a leaf without zooming straight into its vein structure and tracking this delicate system.
Specimen collections
I have always been deeply fascinated by scientific specimen collections.
Wether they are pressed plants in a herbarium, lines of insects pinned to a board or creepy things in jars of formaldehyde, I find great beauty and fascination in preserved specimens and I have been known to spend hours perusing these collections in museums whenever I can. In my humble opinion, the power of a specimen collection is in the repetition. By having several examples of the same thing displayed in a clear simple manner, the similarities and differences can be clearly seen and a much deeper understanding can be developed than what you could glean from a single specimen alone.