This series of paintings and ceramics emerged from the numerous Melbourne lockdowns of 2020-21. Quarantined at home for months on end, Tai Snaith walked the nearby Merri Creek daily, becoming intimately familiar with its changing environment. She picked bouquets of the many invasive plants that grow there, placing them in her surreal, ominous hand-built black vessels to form unsettling still life arrangements, and painted them at different stages of wilt and decay.

Resilient and opportunistic, weeds can be both problematic in their invasive success and advantageous as medicine, food and dyes. These paintings celebrate their potential for beauty and joy, but they are also uneasy, hinting at underlying darkness. Through this project Snaith reflected on her identity as a fifth-generation white Australian, coming to describe herself as “a type of weed”—in all the complexity of the word.

Text by curator Anna Dunnill, A plant in the wrong place exhibition, Counihan Gallery, 2022