In his rollicking scientific true-crime book, The Butterfly Thief, Walter Marsh delves into the dark side of museum collection histories – and one bizarre heist.
- Lecturer and Researcher in Plant Humanities, UNSW
During a solar eclipse in a forest in Italy’s Dolomites region, scientists seized the chance to explore a fascinating question.
Hortensias, lauriers-roses, jonquilles… Les plantes toxiques nous entourent, sans que l’on en ait toujours conscience. Mais certaines le sont plus que d’autres, comme celles cultivées au château d’Alnwick.
Prudence Gibson meets the woman behind the world’s most poisonous garden, and explains why even common plants such as azalea and dumbcane deserve our respect.
Most of the plants we know and admire were named after white, western men. Indigenous knowledge has been largely absent from the field of botany.
This new show at the Powerhouse Museum reflects the chaos of the digital world and the ubiquity of digital tracking.
They tend backyards brimming with cactus varieties, consuming the produce. Prudence Gibson meets a hidden group of gardeners and ponders the allure – and – danger of psychoactive plants.
Daniel Boyd’s solo exhibition Treasure Island, now at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, is a deeply political and personal interrogation of Australia’s colonial history.
Eucalyptusdom is a testament to the utilitarian and cultural life of a remarkable tree.
A new survey exhibition of contemporary artist Janet Laurence urges us to reconsider the relationship between art, nature and politics.
In a contemporary culture that is saturated with images of death, homelessness and war, it is perhaps the quiet stillness of David Goldblatt’s photographs that make them a little unnerving.
The standard of the 2017 Wynne finalists is as haphazard as previous years, hampered by a sense of tokenism and conventional landscapes, but works by Napanyapa Yunupingu and Juz Kitson stand out.
A new study appears to show plants can learn from experience and choose a response. This raises some intriguing questions about the possibility of plant cognition.
As scientists make a renewed push for greater action on climate change, a new installation at the Australian Museum brings home the fragility of our world.
Sydney’s Garden Palace, which burned to the ground in 1882, was a monument to empire’s glory. Indigenous artist Jonathan Jones is now working on an epic exhibition that will explore this historical epoch from an Aboriginal perspective.
William Yang has, maybe more than anyone else, shaped Sydney’s view of itself. A new book, William Yang: Stories of Love and Death, collects his iconic photographs, with scrawled annotations.
Is this a dance work, an exhibition, or a melding of the two? Xavier Le Roy’s latest work, in Sydney, raises many questions, such as: Is it enough to present dancers as interactive, moving art objects?
Artist Mike Parr’s career might be best described as a series of alarming acts - he’s cut his legs with a scalpel and used his blood as paint. His latest act is erase his work by painting it white.
The Wynne Prize has been notoriously male-dominated. What does this year’s winning artwork by Natasha Bieniek tell us about the nature of this particular award and how we can improve it?
It’s hard to resist the extraordinary charisma of performance artist Marina Abramovic, who has just started a new residency in Sydney.
Evie Wyld will be a guest at this year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival. Here, she speaks with a passionate reader about the success of her award-winning book, All The Birds, Singing.
There is a flock of swallows that swoops low across the clifftop nearby. This kind of joyful flight, that windy rush of ornithological freedom, is at the heart of Perth Theatre Company The Last Great Hunt’s…
Sydney’s Lord Mayor Clover Moore has turned me into a milk crate acolyte. Driving to work this morning, I screeched to a stop by the side of the road. Why? There was a blue milk crate lying in the gutter…
The real spectacle of the Archibald Portrait Prize emerges behind the scenes. Each year, the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) loading dock turns into a frenzy of artwork arrivals and departures…
