Colleen Southwell: The Garden Artist

Nature and art collide in the stunning, intricate artwork created by Colleen. In our Friday Feature Artist interview Colleen shared her love for nature and how she combines it with her unique artistic process, plus insights on what we can learn from time in the garden. 

Colleen Southwell's Friday Feature Artist Interview can be found at the bottom of this page.

Colleen Southwell is a full-time artist based near Orange in regional New South Wales. Colleen's finely detailed paper sculptures of botanical elements are crafted entirely in white. This absence of colour invites you to pause, observe and genuinely appreciate the minute details of the world around us mounted with entomology pins. These hundreds of finely drawn, cut and embossed pieces of paper become leaves, roots, spider webs, nests and blooms, a whole world within a frame. The shadows cast by these pieces are a crucial element reflecting the fragility of the subject and its changes with the light. 

Colleen's connection to nature runs deep. Her garden is a place to work, rest and rejuvenate. It’s a sanctuary teeming with life and shared with animals, birds and insects. Colleen shared her story with Fibre Arts Take Two and added some sage advice for aspiring artists.

Creativity and Nature

Colleen has always been a creative type, “It's difficult to pinpoint the exact time, but I guess I've always been a maker of some sort. I used to make all of my own clothes and furnishings for the house. I've always been a painter and a drawer for as long as I can remember, and I grew up in a very creative household.”

For Colleen, her creativity has also always been connected to nature. ”I've always, for as long as I can remember, really had a connection with nature,” she explains. “We moved from Sydney to Orange when I had just turned eight, the reason being that my mum, at that point, was very unwell, so it was a case of trying to carve a new life, and part of that was reconnecting with nature. So, from a very young age, I really understood how important it is for our well-being. Mum was a gardener too. So her influence was there from childhood as well. It has been a lifelong thing, that connection to not just the bigger picture but the details, but certainly, Mum was definitely a big influence. I think as you get older, you realise more and more in looking back, just how important those earlier connections were.”

The Garden

Colleen continues her creative connection with nature by finding constant inspiration from her own garde. “The garden is about 15 years old now. My background, or really my second career, was in landscape or garden design. I retrained in horticulture when my boys were babies, and at that time, we were in the process of building our home. I had had a couple of previous homes as well with my husband, and then also before I was married, so I had made my own gardens in the past, but this country garden has certainly been a labour of love.”

This labour of love is also a benefit for the whole family. “It's all been about the growing of home and the creation of a space that is immersive for us,” explains Colleen. “A place where we can gather with family and with friends. But it's also been very much about growing a home for the other lives that we share the garden with. It's been all about growing for diversity and insects and birds and so on, and that certainly follows through in my artwork. We live in a cold climate so we have the joy of very clearly defined seasons. It's all about a garden that settles gently within the landscape but also a garden that pulls you in closely to look at those details. So it's just as important for me in the garden to do that as it is with my artwork, and they certainly both go hand in hand.”

Patterns and Connections

In her pieces, Colleen rarely tries to recreate specific species of flora and fauna. “I'm more interested in the garden and the interaction with plants, flowers and foliage and insects and so on. It’s in the patterns that I see and the way that pieces connect together, and the shapes and forms of plants. So often, the plants I create are an imagined collation, I suppose, of those patterns and shapes and forms. I tend not to try to replicate something exactly. At times, if I'm doing insects, for example, a lot of the parts, like the body parts of the insect, will actually be made up of botanical pieces, as well as the usual kind of insect forms and wings and so on. 

So sometimes, there's a bit of play between the botanical and the entomological. I'm pulling elements from both of those. But it begins with a sketch, a general composition sketch that inevitably always changes. I find it interesting that once I construct the pieces, they tend to take on a life of their own. They then start to dictate to me how they should be pinned and the best way to present them so that the shadow fall becomes part of the artwork, too. I'm in control in those early stages, but when it gets to pinning, it evolves a lot.”

Emotional Connections

Colleen has seen many people become emotional when they connect with her work. “I think because there's a quietness and a reverence to the pieces which I'm really pleased about,” she says. “It's what I aim for. So every now and again, there'll be something in a piece that reminds someone of perhaps a loved one or a place, or a garden or a home. There can be those connections which are really lovely. The thing I love about my work, too, in terms of the way that it connects with people, is that so often in a gallery situation, for example, people will stand back from artwork to appreciate it, but in order to really engage with mine, you have to move in closely. 

You need to move in and study and really look closely because there's so much to be seen. And often there are hidden elements in the work, too, that you don't notice until you look really closely. That really is a play with the idea of wanting people to do the same with the world, with nature around them, to be close with it. I think the more you engage with something, the more you understand it, and then the more you understand it, the more you're likely to care about it.”

Create!

Colleen has some wonderful advice for aspiring artists. “They must, quite simply, just create. The more you make, the more you create, the more you do, the more that generates and fosters ideas and creativity. So just get something on paper. Make a mark. Every artist must believe in themselves and in what they are doing and be prepared to be proud of that and to do that, regardless of their training or background. 

Be prepared to call yourself an artist. Build a community of like minds and supporting people and that also goes for the people who are actually collecting their work too. I would really encourage artists to get to know the people who were buying their work. It's not always that easy to do that, particularly through a gallery situation, but the more you can have that relationship, one-on-one, with the people who are collecting your work, I think the better and the stronger your art practice is going to be. 

Last, every artist must avoid the pressure to toe the line of popular messages. A lot of artwork carries very strong, very political messages, and I fully appreciate that. That has its place. But, if the message of your artwork is to share beauty and to share joy and be uplifting, then absolutely do that because that needs to be acknowledged as being just as worthy a message in itself.”