Modern dyes and pigments are extremely convenient, bright and present an endless palette of colour. Working with local colour from found stone and extracted from plants lends an entirely different range of colours. Eucalyptus, of which there are said to be more than 800 in Australia, are also a source of colour. Soft orange and rusty brown are my favourites to extract so far. Working on an artist residency in Nagano, Japan, I created a library of local colour and used these to dye a series of plant portraits from the small town. The local landscape literally inhabits the resulting artworks.

detail from "Dotterell Paradise" 2018. A black-fronted dotterell that likes to live amongst the new housing development, in a lucious, vegetated but unreal concrete drainage system.