Garden Sanctuary: Visions of Australian Flora — Exhibition Opening

Mark Dober is an established artist. He makes paintings and drawings in the landscape, mostly in the surrounds of Castlemaine in central Victoria where he lives. The artist’s work is a response to ‘being there’.

Mark’s work ranges across size and media. His wall-sized works on paper, using watercolour and gouache and pinned to the walls, are shown at regional and public galleries (much of this work has been made at residencies).

The artist’s work is regularly shown in prestigious national contemporary art prizes.

Mark has a PhD in Painting from Monash University. He is a member of the Australian Watercolour Institute.

Growing up on a native flower farm in central New South Wales, Samuel Mulcahy has always been fascinated with plant aesthetics and structure. The organised chaos of a plant’s growth can seem simple but is endlessly complex and highly evolved. Working since 2015, Mulcahy‘s practice is based in obsessive recycling and close observation of the natural world, pretengineering his fantasy genus ‘tetesteiiis’ into existence from the waste of construction sites. These plants draw attention to the natural world being paved over by these industrial materials, and highlighting the fragility and resilience of botanic species.

Dolores Skowronski – Malloni was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she studied Graphics and Interior Design. After migrating to Australia, Dolores completed a Bachelor of Arts Degree at Monash University in 1982. Dolores became involved in Botanical Art in 1993, studying with Jenny Phillips at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne / Naarm.

Dolores’s botanical paintings have been exhibited in solo and group shows, with her artwork held in private and corporate collections in Australia and overseas including three works in the State Botanical Collection at the National Herbarium of Victoria.

From 1994 to 2008 Dolores was guest botanical artist for The Grampians Wildflower Show in Victoria. In 2005, Dolores won a silver medal from the Royal Horticultural Society London for her collection of eight passionflower paintings exhibited at the London Flower Show. In 2009, Dolores was invited to participate in the BotanicAsia exhibition with nine other highly acclaimed artists.

Dolores has self-published two books showcasing her artworks of terrestrial orchids of the Grampians and trees of the Geelong Botanic Gardens with her artwork featured in botanical art calendars, Christmas cards, postcards and print series. Dolores has taught a variety of botanical art workshops and from 2010 to 2019 tutored weekly classes at the Geelong Botanical Art School. As part of the 2025 WAMA Art Prize, Dolores received an Award of Excellence for her botanical illustration of the Grampians Bitter-pea. Dolores is currently creating botanical illustrations of the endemic flora of the Grampians / Gariwerd region in collaboration with the team at WAMA Foundation, Halls Gap.

Qun Zhang practices art and architecture between Ballarat, Melbourne, and Halls Gap. Working primarily in watercolour and ink, his practice explores domestic landscapes, houses and gardens as vessels of memory, longing, and identity.

Influenced by a childhood immersed in the expansive visual fields of Chinese scroll paintings and the search-and-find illustrations of Where’s Wally and I Spy, his works flatten perspective into immersive two-dimensional environments that invite slow looking and discovery. Satisfying an impulse to collect these miniature worlds, the work invites a childlike curiosity, immersion, and repetition. The detailed drawings of building contained universes where the relationships between objects, houses, gardens, and people feel ordered and legible.

Born in China, raised in New Zealand, and now based in Australia, Zhang’s practice reflects an ongoing fascination with how people live and inhabit place. He constructs impossible views from the everyday that sit somewhere between memory, archive, and imagination.