Exhibition celebrates WA's unique floral ecosystem

A new exhibition at Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery celebrates the longer, warmer days that come with the Noongar seasons of Djilba and Kambarang, with artworks that explore the ways people make meaning from flora.

In Wildflower Season watercolours by Emily Pelloe, charting the South West’s abundance of flowering plants, will be exhibited in full for the first time since they were gifted to The University in Western Australia in 1941. 

Pelloe was well known for her passions for botany, journalism and equestrian sports. Her enterprising spirit saw her initiate the ‘women’s interests’ column in The West Australian newspaper, where she would often champion women’s advancement in society and the State’s ‘floral glory’.

Image: Emily Pelloe, Untitled (Banksia Spp), 1926, reproduced in Hal Colebatch’s The Story of 100 Years. Photo: Robert Frith .

A prolific and self-taught artist, many of her watercolours were completed on long distance horse rides – including a two-week journey from Perth to Augusta in 1917.

LWAG’s UWA Art Collection Curator Gemma Weston said the gallery was excited to showcase the beautiful and delicate collection of 40 paintings, which had undergone an extensive conservation and framing project for the exhibition.

“Emily Pelloe was an incredibly dynamic and enterprising figure, who did much to popularise the study of local flowers and contributed to a kind of ‘wildflower fever’ in Perth in the 1920s,” Ms Weston said.

“She produced an archive of work, both in painting and publishing, that opens a fascinating door into the past – and which also reminds us how precious and special our ecosystem is.”

Pelloe’s watercolours will be accompanied by a diverse selection of artworks exploring the stories we tell about plants and flowers.

Paintings, etchings, sculpture, photography and moving images will draw on memory, emotion and cultural heritage.

The exhibition includes a multimedia commission by celebrated Noongar theatre-maker and director Kylie Bracknell, which draws from a personal archive of photographs of Country captured while location scouting.

Other artworks include the winner of the 2020 York Botanical Art Prize, Kirsten Hudson’s Requiem/Kalyakoorl, 13 photo-realistic drawings by Gregory Pryor documenting Western Australian specimens held by the Herbarium in Vienna and works by Penny Coss and Lucy Griggs.

Wildflower Season opens Friday 8 September at 5.30pm and runs till Saturday 9 December. The Gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday, 12pm to 5pm, and admission is free.  For more information visit the LWAG website.