Photo Collage, Acrylic and Resin on Wood Panel | 12×12 inches | 1⅞" Deep | Custom Framed in White Wood Floater Frame | 2023 | Nudibranch Series

What if we told you none of this was invented?

Every creature, every crystal, every impossible colour combination in Nudi Malachite is completely, verifiably, astonishingly real. The teal-spotted nudibranch sliding across the upper left — real. The emerald malachite crystals shooting upward like a miniature cathedral — real. The explosion of red coral, the oyster mushrooms soft as silk, the electric blue and crimson sea anemone blazing at the centre like something from a fever dream — all of it real, all of it existing right now on this planet, in this universe, without anyone's permission or assistance.

This is the painting that asks the question the artist could not stop asking:

How can this possibly be random?

The nudibranch — sea slug seems an almost insultingly inadequate name for these creatures — are among the most visually extraordinary animals on earth. They have no shell. They are essentially naked (the name means exactly that — nudus meaning bare, brankhia meaning gills). And in their vulnerability they developed something else entirely: colour so vivid, pattern so precise, beauty so absolute that predators are stopped in their tracks, that human beings with cameras have built entire careers around photographing them, that an artist from New Zealand living in Brooklyn looked at one for the first time and felt something shift permanently in her understanding of what nature is capable of.

Some of them are poisonous. Some of them are neon. Some of them look like the dessert counter of a Parisian patisserie — those impossible combinations of colour and texture that make you wonder if the ocean and the pastry chef have been in conversation all along.

Nudi Malachite brings the nudibranch into conversation with malachite crystals and oyster mushrooms — three kingdoms of the natural world that share an almost supernatural commitment to beauty, to pattern, to the kind of visual extravagance that has no obvious evolutionary explanation except that perhaps the universe simply enjoys making extraordinary things.

Created in a unique process that combines photographic collage, hand-applied acrylic paint and a final layer of high-gloss resin, the surface of this work has an extraordinary depth and luminosity — the resin giving everything beneath it a jewel-like quality, as though the creatures and crystals are suspended in water or glass, preserved and perfect and impossibly alive.

Part of the Nudibranch series — a body of work born from the conviction that the natural world is so extravagantly, impossibly beautiful that to look at it carefully is itself a spiritual act.

✦ Original, one-of-a-kind work ✦ Photo collage, acrylic and resin on wood panel ✦ 12 × 12 inches | 1⅞" deep ✦ Custom framed in white wood floater frame ✦ Part of the Nudibranch series ✦ Ready to hang ✦ Free worldwide shipping

Real. All of it. Somehow, impossibly, real.