HOO ART GALLERY
Dharshi de Silva works at the intersection of botanical process and fine art. Her paintings begin as direct impressions, plant matter pressed onto canvas through tannin, heat, steam, and pressure, then developed over time with earth pigment, natural dye, and pastel. Each work carries ten years of a single garden's history: over 1,000 plants, 30 hand-selected trees, cultivated on the Mornington Peninsula as both sanctuary and source material.
The work sits closer to vanitas painting than botanical illustration. Contact, trace, and decay become the subject as much as the flower itself: a meditation on beauty as something that is always already ending.
Hoo Gallery represents Dharshi's practice across two spaces, Mount Eliza and Richmond, Melbourne.
Dharshi de Silva's paintings begin as botanical contact impressions: plants pressed directly from her garden onto cloth, then developed with earth pigment, natural dye, and pastel. Each impression is singular and cannot be repeated, a record of one plant's contact with one surface at a single moment.
The work draws on a lineage of botanical and printmaking traditions, from the pale restraint of Japanese screen painting to the bold, graphic economy of Toulouse-Lautrec's posters, translated through a process closer to contact printing than illustration.
De Silva frames these works as vanitas paintings rather than botanical studies: meditations on beauty as a condition that is always passing. Ivy, dahlia, and other garden forms appear not as subjects to be captured but as traces of something already in the process of ending.
Some works carry the phrase "All is Well," inscribed or woven across the canvas, a quiet counterpoint to the vanitas theme: an insistence on hope and presence held alongside the acknowledgment of impermanence.