These drawings are not botanical illustrations in any scientific sense. I don’t know much about botany or horticulture; but I am quite interested in found plant material which is imperfect, damaged, deformed or decomposing. Ultimately, the subject matter is secondary to the process, which is absorbing and labour-intensive, involving many layers of colour and a satisfying degree of precision afforded by the medium.

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Carlo Golin first studied painting at RMIT, graduating in 1979. He has maintained his practice for over 30 years, employing a variety of artistic approaches from painting to photography, collage and drawing.

The photo works came about through unsuccessful attempts at trying to arrange poppies in a vase. After one particular session, I noticed a single poppy I had discarded on a glass topped surface. It and its reflection looked ‘right’ and so this body of work began.

I have always painted fruit. They are symbols of abundance, beauty, decay and my paintings sit somewhere near or within these concepts. Often using an odd number of pieces to arrange, the challenge is to balance but also to create some sort of tension through the painting’s composition and theme.

Greg Elms is a Melbourne based artist whose practice employs both traditional and alternative photographic techniques. His work investigates notions of transience and preservation, most often in the natural world, with an emphasis on the nexus between art and science. 

With over two decades of art practice, he has participated in many solo and group exhibitions. His work is innumerous private collections and features extensively in the collection of the Ritz Carlton Melbourne. 

He has a Bachelor of Arts in Photography from RMIT Melbourne, and a Post Graduate Diploma of Visual Art from VCA Melbourne. His work investigates the natural world exploring themes of reality, mortality and the sublime.

Dutch-born Australian artist Judith Van Heeren has painted and observed the natural world for the past 30 years. Van Heeren lives and works in central Victoria, the land and waters of the Dja Dja Wurrung, this is where she hikes daily, closely observing the changing landscapes and collecting specimens, these specimens are then arranged and painted into imagined landscapes in the half light of dawn or evening, holding both the dark and the light.  

Judith’s painting process is highly intuitive, much like a collaboration and or conversation with nature. Van Heerens interests are in the rich symbolism, stories, history, harmony, transcendence, a timely reminder that the world is one single interconnected organism.  

Judith Van Heeren courtesy of Murray White Room.

In her practice Kohl Tyler contemplates notions of ephemerality, interconnectedness and one’s place within the cosmos. Drawing inspiration from both physical and phenomenal elements of the natural world, she processes her ecological grief making work that posits future ecologies, imagined organic remnants or attempts to archive fleeting biodiversity. She works across ceramic sculpture, watercolour painting, and social practice.

Kohl Tyler is an Aotearoa/New Zealand born artist who’s been based in Naarm/Melbourne since 2018. She completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at Whitecliffe College of Art and Design in 2016 and was awarded the Artist Alliance Graduate Award in 2016. In 2017, she won the Estuary Art and Ecology Award at Malcolm Smith Gallery in Auckland, NZ. She has presented solo exhibitions in Aotearoa and Australia including; All is Ephemeral, FELTspace, Adelaide, SA (2024), Signals, Printmaker Gallery, Melbourne, VIC (2022), and Moving Past the Sun, Weasel Gallery, Hamilton, NZ (2020). In 2022 she presented Offerings, a social art installation held at the UNESCO heritage-listed Carlton Gardens in Naarm, Australia, supported by the City of Melbourne Art Grants.

Her work is held in the public collection of the Gippsland Art Gallery, VIC and in private collections throughout Australia and Aotearoa.