Nature as Artifice explores the often-overlooked ways colonial women in Tasmania engaged with the unfamiliar natural world around them. While male artists tended to depict sweeping, picturesque landscapes, women focused on the intimate details of nature—through botanical drawings, specimen collecting, and decorative arts. Their creative practices, from embroidery to the display of preserved birds and insects, reveal how they sought to understand, domesticate, and aestheticise a strange environment. Drawing on collections at Narryna and beyond, the exhibition brings this rich yet under-recognised visual legacy into focus.

At once appreciative and possessive, these historical practices transformed nature into something both admired and controlled. The contemporary artists in this exhibition respond to these contradictions, reflecting on themes of preservation, loss, and environmental change. Through photography, textiles, sculpture, and installation, they re-examine colonial perspectives and consider what they can teach us about our current relationship with the natural world—inviting audiences to reflect on beauty, fragility, and the ongoing tension between reverence for nature and the impulse to contain it.

Featuring artworks by Llewellyn Negrin, Jane Slade, Denise Rathbone, Frances Watson, Ruth Frost, Linda Erceg, Chantale Delrue, Chrystil Berg, Jan Dineen and Janine Combes