Georgiana Molloy: A Botanical Life, A Creative Lineage

29 Nov

(A companion to “In Search of New Colour: Notes from the Blue Mountains”)

Introduction — Returning to Georgiana

This post is the second part of a story.
The first part can be read here: In Search of New Colour: Notes from the Blue Mountains.
And there will undoubtedly be a third. Travelling as an artist always sharpens the senses. Every new landscape brings a shift: in colour, in rhythm, in the quality of light and that shift finds its way into the work.

In my last blog post, I wrote about the sensation of arriving in the Blue Mountains — the luminous haze, the shifting blues, and the quiet astonishment of being in a landscape that feels wholly new.
One voice kept returning to me as I worked: Georgiana Molloy, the 19th-century botanical collector whose words opened that piece.

“Such flowers of imagination… to come suddenly on such gems and be surrounded by them makes you for a time think you are in fairy land.”

Her phrase describes the complex joy of discovering new plants and landscapes and that is something at the very heart of my time here.

This new post is a continuation of that thought: a deeper look at who Georgiana Molloy was, why her story matters, how she relates to the eco-feminist threads in my work, and how she connects both of the plant portrait paintings I made during a residency in Portugal in 2014.

Who Was Georgiana Molloy?

Born in England in 1805, Georgiana Molloy emigrated to Western Australia in the early 1830s. Far from home, she began collecting, preserving and sending plant specimens back to botanists in Britain.
Although she had no formal scientific training, her instinctive curiosity and meticulous attention to detail made her one of the most respected botanical collectors of her time.

Her letters reveal:

a profound sensitivity to the natural world,
the emotional complexities of colonial life,
and the quiet determination to keep noticing beauty despite hardship.

Her work prefigures what we now understand as eco-feminism — the idea that women’s embodied knowledge of landscapes and plants carries an authority often overlooked in traditional histories. For Molloy, botany was not simply study: it was relationship, care, and a way of being in the world.

Women of Flowers - Returning to Earlier Work

Being here in the Blue Mountains has brought me back to one of the most meaningful collaborations of my career: my residency in Portugal with Australian artist India Flint, and our later exhibition Daughters of Eve.

The premise of that exhibition was simple and powerful: each of us chose women whose lives were deeply connected with plants - real or imagined, mythic or historical - forming a kind of botanical lineage of women, landscape and story.

It was India who introduced me to Georgiana Molloy, and it was her suggestion to include Molloy as one of our “women of flowers.” Through India’s influence I began reading her letters and learning her story. She quickly became a quiet but significant presence in the project.

India Flint’s art practice shaped far more than the conceptual underpinning of the exhibition. She is renowned for eco-printing — using leaves, bark, flowers, minerals and time itself to imprint natural colour directly onto cloth. Her process gives plants the leading voice, allowing their pigments to reveal themselves through heat, water, and patience.

This deeply influenced the two paintings relating to Georgiana Malloy that I created during that residency:

A Scottish Plant Portrait

Georgiana Malloy, Scotland, 2014 100×100cms

Inspired by plants from the Scottish landscape , the work carried the aesthetic of eco-printing — veils of plant-like impressions, delicate layers of colour, and marks that felt as though they had been transferred rather than painted.

An Australian Plant Portrait

Georgiana Malloy, Australia, 2014 100×100cms

Using plant forms gathered in Portugal, including eucalyptus, linked to Australia through India’s practice and grown widely in Portugal, this painting also echoed eco-printing: diffused pigments, atmospheric stains, and the suggestion of botanical traces pressed onto the surface.

These works became a conversation:

between Scotland and Australia,
between my own language and India’s botanical one,
between two hemispheres and two inheritances,
and between the internal landscape and the external one.

Now, standing in the Blue Mountains, that conversation feels alive again.
This landscape — with its extraordinary colours, eucalyptus haze and shifting atmospheres — resonates deeply with the themes I explored years ago: women, plants, identity, and transformation.

This is why Georgiana feels especially present now. Her deep emotional response to an unfamiliar landscape echoes my own, and her botanical attentiveness mirrors the way I am learning to see again in this place.

Why Her Story Matters - Eco-Feminism, Care, and Noticing

Georgiana Molloy reminds me that:

Noticing is a form of devotion
Care is a form of knowledge
Women’s relationships with plants are creative acts in themselves
Botanical work is emotional, embodied, and ecological

She learned through touch, attention and curiosity — not through hierarchy or institutional power. Her science was relational and her art was in her attentiveness.

As a painter, I feel this deeply. My work is, at its core, a practice of noticing and of allowing landscapes to alter me.

What Comes Next

In the coming weeks, I’ll continue walking, sketching and painting in the Blue Mountains. Exploring eucalyptus light, shifting blues and botanical textures.

And beginning new pieces that continue that conversation across continents and time.

This post is the second part of a story.
The first part can be read here: In Search of New Colour: Notes from the Blue Mountains.
And there will undoubtedly be a third.

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