My art practice is interwoven with citizen science and the natural world. Coming together with like-minded volunteers for seasonal snipe counts or the weeding of Reserves brings me closer to species not much known.

My interest in beetles was re-ignited when I found this beetle in Budj Bim National Park, having not seen one before. I observed the motion of its antennae in a courtship display and proceeded to draw it before it departed. The act of drawing in order to correctly identify species has a long lineage of botanical illustrators and today’s drawing provides information for global databases tracking migratory species.

The screenprint medium allows me to put on layers of colour in a negative reduction technique. This process, using hand-cut stencils and painting on the screen in a multi-colour arrangement gives me the flexibility to choose a different path after each printed colour.