Helen Mueller has been printmaking for 25 years, but moving to Hobart four years ago saw a shift in her focus. “It’s been a huge consciousness exercise, coming to Tasmania,” she says. “I’ve become completely aware of the beautiful natural environment but also the weight of the history it carries. It’s kind of like a petri dish of the rest of Australia, its history is much more palpable than on the mainland.”

Living near a nature reserve, she began walking there every day, collecting materials from the forest floor—foliage, seeds—to bring back home and use in her work. “I try to replicate, or explore, the rhythms and repetitions, the light and shade, of things I find in the forest. The interactions with materials is what drives the process.”

It is important to Mueller to use sustainable materials—woodblocks cut from radiata pine construction ply, which prints foliage forms onto kozo paper made from the inner bark of a mulberry tree. With these creations showing at Handmark Gallery, Mueller notes the paper is extremely delicate: “It ends up being almost ink suspended in air. In a way, it reflects that connection with the forest that I walk in. It requires care, it is delicate and threatened. It’s a mirror of my subject matter.”

It has been important for Mueller, in working with and within the natural environment, to pay her respects to the First Peoples of Tasmania. “I’ve had the privilege of meeting the original custodians of this land and walking with them on Country, getting to glimpse through their eyes what the land means to them.”

In turn, she hopes her art can encourage others to look outwards, and explore what is around us. “The wellness industry wants us to go into nature because it’s good for us. I’d rather flip the narrative and say, how should we be tending our natural environment? Let’s give it a voice.”

forest stories
Helen Mueller
Handmark Gallery
On now—4 November