Wildflowering: Art, Design, and the Intelligence of Native Flora
Wildflowering: Art, Design, and the Intelligence of Native Flora
By Carol Schwarzman
When you walk through the wallum heathland of South East Queensland – in the Spring after the Winter rains – you experience a landscape transformed into vibrant, blooming wildflower habitat, thriving on sandy, nutrient-poor soil. Appropriately, the exhibition Wildflowering by Design at Caloundra Regional Gallery (17 October to 30 November 2025) brings focus to the under-appreciated significance of South East Queensland’s native flora, not only for beauty’s sake, but also to the plants’ ecological role in attracting bees and birds, while supporting numerous threatened and endangered species.[1] In Wildflowering by Design (WbD), twenty-four artists and designers celebrate important human-plant connections of place, history, and meaning prompted by their bushwalk observations of humble wildflowers such as gnarly wallum banksia, star-shaped white Sprengelia, yellow pea flowers, and fragrant umbels of Vanilla Lilies. This final exhibition of a two-year long tour is deftly balanced by curators Dr Sue Davis and Dr Lisa Chandler, who bring together vastly different artistic styles, media and sensibilities. As a whole, Wildflowering by Design is energising and uplifting in its unified diversity, and encourages viewers to roam intuitively amongst sixty or so artworks.
See Figure 1 Wildflowering by Design touring exhibition, Caloundra Regional Gallery, Photo: Sarah Jane Smith
See Figure 2 Wildflowering by Design local artist exhibition, Caloundra Regional Gallery, Photo: Sarah Jane Smith
Contrasting, Diverse, and Equal Voices
To my mind, the assemblage of such a broad range of creative voices and approaches assembled in WbD parallels the vivid, dense biodiversity of the wallum. For both, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. In the exhibition, no two artists’ work are similar, or perceived to be more consequential than the show’s unique, overall ecology. Importantly, plants and the artists’ consideration for them hold the exhibition together. Given the variety of the artworks, an engaged viewer is persuaded to ask questions such as, How has each artist shaped their relationship to the wallum wildflowers or other plants? How does each artist materially express that relationship?
See Figure 3 Work on the left by Rosie Lloyd-Giblett and Joolie Gibbs right, WIldflowering by Design, Caloundra Regional Gallery, Photo: Sarah Jane Smith
For example, Rosie Lloyd-Giblett’s collection of hand-drawn, chaotic gestural abstractions, entitled Flutter Amongst the Mistletoe Wallum (2025) and Lyrical Line Walking in the Wallum (2025), capture the heady buzz of bird and insect activity one would experience while looking out across a wallum heath. In their immediacy, a viewer senses the artist’s direct presence in the landscape, as she composes quickly, laying down intuitive brushwork in ink (perhaps also using pens and sticks). Plant-like dashes, daubs, squiggles, and patterns fly across paper and balsa wood surfaces. Cutouts of dragon- and butterflies skim across bobbing circles. Bold curves and airy washes advance and recede in a poetic pictorial space, as if our eyes are moving from foreground to background, attentive to a landscape full of life, movement, and sound.
See Figure 4 Cadere in amore cum anima terrae III by Cara Ann Simpson,
In contrast, Cara Ann Simpson’s symmetrical, magisterial works, narratio regenerationis (the narrative of rebirth) (2022), and cadere in amore cum anima terrae III (to fall in love with soul of the earth III) (2020) function more in the realm of archetype, and signify phoenix-like potency. Both works employ flipped, mirrored digital imagery, adding to their archaic, ritualistic silhouettes. Narratio regenerationis is a kaleidoscopic, digital 4K video with sound that disassembles, reassembles, and merges an image of Queensland native wattle branches. Cadere in amore cum anima terrae III is a large-scale, pigment printed photograph whose flowering coral gum branches seem to either stream upward in flight (like angels’ wings) or sit stable and strong as a stag’s antlers. The play of static monumentality and upward motion combine toward a monumental, almost religious paean to trees.[2]
See Figure 5 Work by Rose Barrowcliffe installed at Gympie Regional Gallery
Rose Barrowcliffe’s series of six black-inked woodblock/linoleum block (?) prints on white Hosho paper entitled Poverty Point 2023 Wildflower Series are unmatched in their well-informed, intimate simplicity. Barrowcliffe, a Butchulla woman of the Wonnamutta clan, has caught the structural and gestural essence of flowers such as pink fingers (Caladenia carnea) and tall yellow-eye (Xyris operculata) in a playful, yet sly manner that comes across as effortless. Just as the petalled forms of the flowers she documents emphasise efficient and pragmatic reproduction, her printing technique of rustic, minimalist positive and negative spaces generates uncomplicated “flowerness”. Perhaps, this is to say that less is more when the goal is identifying each blossom’s singular persona.[3]
A Project Engaging Unique Regional Locales
Wildflowering by Design is a project including the assistance and involvement of seven regional communities, a touring exhibition inviting local artists in each region, and a schedule of over 48 workshops, talks, and participatory events. Over time, it has sought to investigate relationships amongst humans and flora and broaden creative possibilities for discovering new knowledge. Based upon artistic research endemic to each place, it has employed 45 Queensland artists. Communities and artists have been immersed in non-competitive, rich, and rewarding experiences: inviting local artists’ involvement at each regional location is paramount to the project’s goals because, “there are creative people everywhere,” as Davis has emphasised continually. Clearly, Wildflowering by Design sets a goal to tap into the imaginative, innovative, and unconventional energies at work in all communities while bringing people together, thereby nurturing affinity with more-than-human worlds.
Multi-species Kinship and Symbiosis
Wildflowering by Design reimagines and reworks traditional botanical study, that places emphasis on specific physical, structural, and functional traits. By describing, identifying, and classifying plants (such as leaf shape and texture, flower parts, stem type, fruit structure, growth habits, and root systems) traditional botany is limited by its self-imposed constructs. Without a doubt, its traditional parameters are primary for identifying and categorising flora. Yet they also conspire to build a worldview seeing plants as isolated entities, meant for extraction, and not networked members of vast more-than-human ecosystems maintaining symbiosis, supporting all life on Earth – as they actually are. Here, in WbD, two artists’ works intently communicating symbiotic entanglement are Edith Rewa’s digital print on fabric entitled Wallum Shimmer (2021), and Joolie Gibbs’ Impermanence (2020), a banner-length drawing rendered in botanical inks hand-made from bunya, mangrove, eucalyptus, bark and resin, iron and bleach on paper. Both of these works create dense pictorial space alive with naturalistic likenesses of plants populating the landscape, curving and overlapping, consorting in rhythmic motion.
See Figure 6 Edith Rewa's Wallum Shimmer to the left, Caloundra Regional Gallery, Photo: Sarah Jane Smith
By placing wildflowers front and centre to the project, and valuing many human participants’ expressions of seeing, feeling, relating to, and interacting with plants, Wildflowering by Design evolves a democratic aesthetic of interspecies entanglement. By truly valuing flora’s nonhuman subjecthood, WbD participants intervene in Western scientific and cultural traditions that see humans as more important than nonhumans. Or, that some humans’ knowledge is “truer” than others. Rejection of others’ standpoints immediately brings to mind Westerners’ dismissal of Indigenous knowledge.
Wildflowering by Design has sought to include and consult with Indigenous artists and Elders wherever possible, in order to highlight and acknowledge with deep respect the depth of Indigenous wisdom of more-than-human relationships with wildflowers and other plants. Traditional Custodians and First Nations speakers at multiple venues reinforced connection to Country and community. The question of whose or what kind of knowledge is of value is of primary significance to Wildflowering by Design. As a project with feminist sympathies, one of its principal aims is to give expression and voice to excluded histories and communities, inclusive of all humans and nonhumans.
Today, multispecies kinship is increasingly understood by non-Indigenous people to be the core of First Nations cultures worldwide, as well as a model for caring for our planet. Through its feminist inclusiveness, and egalitarian approach to making art, Wildflowering by Design has been true to forging other, inclusive paths – confirming art and design’s inbuilt capacities to encourage innovative norms and express new standpoints.
Carol Schwarzman (PhD) is an independent scholar, art critic, and visual artist based in Meanjin/Brisbane. She has published essays and observations on art, nature and culture, and relational art for over 25 years in Australia and the US, and is a member of Yimbaya Maranoa, a cross-cultural group of artists producing experimental creative works and community collaborations.
Notes
[1] Celebrating uniquely Queensland stories, Wildflowering by Design perseveres in the environmental activist work of Queensland botanical artist Kathleen McArthur (1915-2000) and poet Judith Wright (1915-2000). In the mid-20th century, they educated Queensland’s government and the public on the importance of protecting the wallum landscape in South East Queensland. Their activist and artistic legacy forms the foundation for Wildflowering by Design, and is evident throughout the show.
[2] An artist with disabilities, Simpson has persevered through physical challenges and adversity, relearning how to walk, and continuing her artmaking, despite dramatic change.
[3] Wildflowering by Design’s artists' responses to wildflowers have expanded far beyond botanical illustration. Be it clothing, textiles, hats, handbags, paintings, drawings, biochromes, embroidery, or woodcuts. Artworks here are made from ceramic, metal, bush flax, sedges, wire, string, natural dyes, linen, polyester, and paper – the list of media and materials is seemingly endless.
By Carol Schwarzman
When you walk through the wallum heathland of South East Queensland – in the Spring after the Winter rains – you experience a landscape transformed into vibrant, blooming wildflower habitat, thriving on sandy, nutrient-poor soil. Appropriately, the exhibition Wildflowering by Design at Caloundra Regional Gallery (17 October to 30 November 2025) brings focus to the under-appreciated significance of South East Queensland’s native flora, not only for beauty’s sake, but also to the plants’ ecological role in attracting bees and birds, while supporting numerous threatened and endangered species.[1] In Wildflowering by Design (WbD), twenty-four artists and designers celebrate important human-plant connections of place, history, and meaning prompted by their bushwalk observations of humble wildflowers such as gnarly wallum banksia, star-shaped white Sprengelia, yellow pea flowers, and fragrant umbels of Vanilla Lilies. This final exhibition of a two-year long tour is deftly balanced by curators Dr Sue Davis and Dr Lisa Chandler, who bring together vastly different artistic styles, media and sensibilities. As a whole, Wildflowering by Design is energising and uplifting in its unified diversity, and encourages viewers to roam intuitively amongst sixty or so artworks.
See Figure 1 Wildflowering by Design touring exhibition, Caloundra Regional Gallery, Photo: Sarah Jane Smith
See Figure 2 Wildflowering by Design local artist exhibition, Caloundra Regional Gallery, Photo: Sarah Jane Smith
Contrasting, Diverse, and Equal Voices
To my mind, the assemblage of such a broad range of creative voices and approaches assembled in WbD parallels the vivid, dense biodiversity of the wallum. For both, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. In the exhibition, no two artists’ work are similar, or perceived to be more consequential than the show’s unique, overall ecology. Importantly, plants and the artists’ consideration for them hold the exhibition together. Given the variety of the artworks, an engaged viewer is persuaded to ask questions such as, How has each artist shaped their relationship to the wallum wildflowers or other plants? How does each artist materially express that relationship?
See Figure 3 Work on the left by Rosie Lloyd-Giblett and Joolie Gibbs right, WIldflowering by Design, Caloundra Regional Gallery, Photo: Sarah Jane Smith
For example, Rosie Lloyd-Giblett’s collection of hand-drawn, chaotic gestural abstractions, entitled Flutter Amongst the Mistletoe Wallum (2025) and Lyrical Line Walking in the Wallum (2025), capture the heady buzz of bird and insect activity one would experience while looking out across a wallum heath. In their immediacy, a viewer senses the artist’s direct presence in the landscape, as she composes quickly, laying down intuitive brushwork in ink (perhaps also using pens and sticks). Plant-like dashes, daubs, squiggles, and patterns fly across paper and balsa wood surfaces. Cutouts of dragon- and butterflies skim across bobbing circles. Bold curves and airy washes advance and recede in a poetic pictorial space, as if our eyes are moving from foreground to background, attentive to a landscape full of life, movement, and sound.
See Figure 4 Cadere in amore cum anima terrae III by Cara Ann Simpson,
In contrast, Cara Ann Simpson’s symmetrical, magisterial works, narratio regenerationis (the narrative of rebirth) (2022), and cadere in amore cum anima terrae III (to fall in love with soul of the earth III) (2020) function more in the realm of archetype, and signify phoenix-like potency. Both works employ flipped, mirrored digital imagery, adding to their archaic, ritualistic silhouettes. Narratio regenerationis is a kaleidoscopic, digital 4K video with sound that disassembles, reassembles, and merges an image of Queensland native wattle branches. Cadere in amore cum anima terrae III is a large-scale, pigment printed photograph whose flowering coral gum branches seem to either stream upward in flight (like angels’ wings) or sit stable and strong as a stag’s antlers. The play of static monumentality and upward motion combine toward a monumental, almost religious paean to trees.[2]
See Figure 5 Work by Rose Barrowcliffe installed at Gympie Regional Gallery
Rose Barrowcliffe’s series of six black-inked woodblock/linoleum block (?) prints on white Hosho paper entitled Poverty Point 2023 Wildflower Series are unmatched in their well-informed, intimate simplicity. Barrowcliffe, a Butchulla woman of the Wonnamutta clan, has caught the structural and gestural essence of flowers such as pink fingers (Caladenia carnea) and tall yellow-eye (Xyris operculata) in a playful, yet sly manner that comes across as effortless. Just as the petalled forms of the flowers she documents emphasise efficient and pragmatic reproduction, her printing technique of rustic, minimalist positive and negative spaces generates uncomplicated “flowerness”. Perhaps, this is to say that less is more when the goal is identifying each blossom’s singular persona.[3]
A Project Engaging Unique Regional Locales
Wildflowering by Design is a project including the assistance and involvement of seven regional communities, a touring exhibition inviting local artists in each region, and a schedule of over 48 workshops, talks, and participatory events. Over time, it has sought to investigate relationships amongst humans and flora and broaden creative possibilities for discovering new knowledge. Based upon artistic research endemic to each place, it has employed 45 Queensland artists. Communities and artists have been immersed in non-competitive, rich, and rewarding experiences: inviting local artists’ involvement at each regional location is paramount to the project’s goals because, “there are creative people everywhere,” as Davis has emphasised continually. Clearly, Wildflowering by Design sets a goal to tap into the imaginative, innovative, and unconventional energies at work in all communities while bringing people together, thereby nurturing affinity with more-than-human worlds.
Multi-species Kinship and Symbiosis
Wildflowering by Design reimagines and reworks traditional botanical study, that places emphasis on specific physical, structural, and functional traits. By describing, identifying, and classifying plants (such as leaf shape and texture, flower parts, stem type, fruit structure, growth habits, and root systems) traditional botany is limited by its self-imposed constructs. Without a doubt, its traditional parameters are primary for identifying and categorising flora. Yet they also conspire to build a worldview seeing plants as isolated entities, meant for extraction, and not networked members of vast more-than-human ecosystems maintaining symbiosis, supporting all life on Earth – as they actually are. Here, in WbD, two artists’ works intently communicating symbiotic entanglement are Edith Rewa’s digital print on fabric entitled Wallum Shimmer (2021), and Joolie Gibbs’ Impermanence (2020), a banner-length drawing rendered in botanical inks hand-made from bunya, mangrove, eucalyptus, bark and resin, iron and bleach on paper. Both of these works create dense pictorial space alive with naturalistic likenesses of plants populating the landscape, curving and overlapping, consorting in rhythmic motion.
See Figure 6 Edith Rewa's Wallum Shimmer to the left, Caloundra Regional Gallery, Photo: Sarah Jane Smith
By placing wildflowers front and centre to the project, and valuing many human participants’ expressions of seeing, feeling, relating to, and interacting with plants, Wildflowering by Design evolves a democratic aesthetic of interspecies entanglement. By truly valuing flora’s nonhuman subjecthood, WbD participants intervene in Western scientific and cultural traditions that see humans as more important than nonhumans. Or, that some humans’ knowledge is “truer” than others. Rejection of others’ standpoints immediately brings to mind Westerners’ dismissal of Indigenous knowledge.
Wildflowering by Design has sought to include and consult with Indigenous artists and Elders wherever possible, in order to highlight and acknowledge with deep respect the depth of Indigenous wisdom of more-than-human relationships with wildflowers and other plants. Traditional Custodians and First Nations speakers at multiple venues reinforced connection to Country and community. The question of whose or what kind of knowledge is of value is of primary significance to Wildflowering by Design. As a project with feminist sympathies, one of its principal aims is to give expression and voice to excluded histories and communities, inclusive of all humans and nonhumans.
Today, multispecies kinship is increasingly understood by non-Indigenous people to be the core of First Nations cultures worldwide, as well as a model for caring for our planet. Through its feminist inclusiveness, and egalitarian approach to making art, Wildflowering by Design has been true to forging other, inclusive paths – confirming art and design’s inbuilt capacities to encourage innovative norms and express new standpoints.
Carol Schwarzman (PhD) is an independent scholar, art critic, and visual artist based in Meanjin/Brisbane. She has published essays and observations on art, nature and culture, and relational art for over 25 years in Australia and the US, and is a member of Yimbaya Maranoa, a cross-cultural group of artists producing experimental creative works and community collaborations.
Notes
[1] Celebrating uniquely Queensland stories, Wildflowering by Design perseveres in the environmental activist work of Queensland botanical artist Kathleen McArthur (1915-2000) and poet Judith Wright (1915-2000). In the mid-20th century, they educated Queensland’s government and the public on the importance of protecting the wallum landscape in South East Queensland. Their activist and artistic legacy forms the foundation for Wildflowering by Design, and is evident throughout the show.
[2] An artist with disabilities, Simpson has persevered through physical challenges and adversity, relearning how to walk, and continuing her artmaking, despite dramatic change.
[3] Wildflowering by Design’s artists' responses to wildflowers have expanded far beyond botanical illustration. Be it clothing, textiles, hats, handbags, paintings, drawings, biochromes, embroidery, or woodcuts. Artworks here are made from ceramic, metal, bush flax, sedges, wire, string, natural dyes, linen, polyester, and paper – the list of media and materials is seemingly endless.
