Botanica Exotica: Strange Garden

Working with reclaimed textile waste and transformed through the labour-intensive processes of stitching, dyeing and painting, then stabilised with resin, These sculptural forms appear unearthed rather than made. They evoke relics from an unknown civilisation or specimens recovered from imagined ecosystems. Existing between sculpture, design object and imagined artefact, the works invite viewers into worlds where the boundaries between nature and artifice dissolve.

Inspired by cultivated Victorian botanical traditions alongside the hidden worlds of fungi and slime moulds, Kawabata imagines ecosystems where the cultivated and the wild intersect, giving rise to forms that feel both familiar and otherworldly. Fantasy and ecological observation converge in speculative worlds that exist between natural history and fantasy.

Through transformation, reclaimed textiles assume a new material identity, becoming forms that oscillate between natural specimen, cultivated object and imagined artefact. Her practice invites reflection on ecology, material transformation, and the shifting boundaries between the cultivated and the wild.

Some works from this series will debut at Sydney Contemporary 3-6 September 2026