Curator Conversation - Ellis Rowan: Colonialism and Nature Painting

Join Judith Hickson, Curator Queensland Stories at Queensland Museum, as she explores the life and work of Ellis Rowan, a trailblazing 19th Century botanical artist.

Ellis Rowan: Colonialism and Nature Painting presents a new perspective of the artist and the worlds she inhabited while pursuing her passion for art and adventure. Though just a small selection of the vast number of paintings that Rowan produced over her lifetime, the paintings on display are evidence of her enormous talent and eye for beauty, colour and detail.  Yet, alongside Rowan’s brilliant and lasting legacy, there is a parallel narrative of Empire, and its human and environmental impacts, that has, until recently, been largely unexplored.

Building on contemporary discourse on the colonial nature of Rowan’s artistic enterprise, this exhibition offers a more nuanced perspective of her role as a botanical illustrator, a position in which she was intimately entwined with the project of Empire and its impact on the Australian landscape and, especially, on its First Nations peoples.

About the presenter

Judith Hickson joined Queensland Museum in 2016 as Curator of Social History in the Cultures and Histories Program.

Jude’s role is fundamentally embedded in the stories of Queensland’s people and communities - collecting, researching and helping others to represent and tell their own stories and share their lived experiences through the objects they donate.

For Jude, object stories have the ability to transcend time and space and also to serve as an important point of reflection - connecting us to people, places and events beyond our knowing, provoking in us either positive or negative emotions and prompting us to understand our complex world in ways we may previously not have considered.