Beyond Flora, Fauna, and Folklore
- Martha Iserman
- Aug 22
- 3 min read
This past July I had the privilege of presenting Flora, Fauna, and Folklore at The Memo in Healesville, Victoria. The show brought together years of work exploring natural history, mythology, and storytelling through the mediums of watercolor and oil, displaying my paintings in a more dynamic presentation than I ever have before. Seeing the pieces installed as a cohesive world and watching visitors engage with it has been a wonderful growth process for me as an artist. It was both a culmination and a new beginning, a reminder of why I create these mythic habitats in the first place.
My creative practice didn’t stop after the exhibition; it just shifted. Instead of forcing momentum, I let my creative energy shift into different forms. Even during my artist-in-residence time (Wednesdays in the gallery at The Memo), I’ve found myself working on my embroidery art rather than painting.
Finishing installing a show always leaves me in a liminal space. One chapter has ended, but the next hasn’t quite taken shape yet. Rather than forcing new work, I’ve been using this time to reflect and to sit with my ideas. My work is now focused on note-taking, research, and letting fragments of concepts gather. I’m excited about the installation and more immersive elements of the Flora Fauna and Folklore exhibition, and would like to push these ideas further. I imagine more conceptual imagery in the future, moving away from representational wildlife imagery and playing with scale and materiality.
That isn’t to say my themes won’t focus on folklore, natural worlds, and the symbolic systems that tie them together. Those threads remain at the heart of my practice, but I’m curious about how they can be stretched, transformed, or abstracted. I want to explore not only the creatures and stories themselves, but also the spaces between them, the archetypes, the liminal figures, and the cycles of transformation they represent.
Also, that doesn't mean I haven't been creative or have stopped creating in this time. I’ve been working hard at planning an designing my upcoming Halloween party. This year’s theme is rooted in Victorian vampire decadence, and I’ve been building props, staging spaces, and designing activities with the same care and attention to atmosphere that I brought to the Memo show. In many ways, it feels like another form of installation — transforming my home into an immersive world where guests step into a story. It’s playful, but also deeply connected to the themes I return to in my art: folklore, ritual, and the way environments shape our imagination.
Working on something so theatrical has reminded me how much I enjoy creating spaces as much as individual pieces. It’s made me even more eager to carry that energy forward into future projects, ones that push further into conceptual imagery, explore essoteric beings and archetypes, and weave together installation, storytelling, and materiality. This season of reflection and creation feels like a threshold, a pause before the next body of work begins to take shape.
My work often circles themes of alchemy and metamorphosis, and I’m realizing my creative life does the same. The Memo show was a creation stage, full of energy, visibility, and transformation. Now I’m in the slower, darker stage of distillation, where ideas settle and new forms begin to crystallize. Working on the Halloween party, with its rituals of death and return, reminded me that endings are not final, they’re the soil for transformation.
Flora Fauna and Folklore is currently up at The Memo in Healesville until September 27th. There will be a closing event on September 27th at 2pm with an artist talk.
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