This series of five works takes the form of botanical specimens held within Solander boxes.

The Solander box, developed in the 1760s by botanist Daniel Solander while working at the British Museum, was designed as a portable archival structure for preserving and storing botanical specimens collected on expeditions. Solander later travelled with Joseph Banks on James Cook’s first Pacific voyage aboard the HMS Endeavour (1768–1771), where extensive plant specimens were gathered along the Australian coast, embedding the box within early colonial systems of classification and extraction.

Each box contains a 1:1 paper-cut reconstruction of etchings from Joseph Banks’ Florilegium, made from blackened pages of the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Aboriginal Life (A.W. Reed), a reversal of the colonial specimen, in which botanical imagery is reconstructed through a text shaped by its own systems of erasure and representation.

The works return to Banks’ Florilegium as an index of absence, reproducing its botanical images while also pointing to what was excluded or unrecorded within its colonial framework, particularly the names, medicinal, and cultural knowledge of First Peoples that was erased or rendered invisible.

Each box also contains an archival tool: a bone fold, knife, ruler, tweezers, and linen spool, positioned as instruments of survival within and against the archive. These tools are drawn from my own studio practice, where they are used to intervene in colonial books and texts.

The title after Banks functions as both an art-historical reference and a critical position: indicating a work derived from or responding to an original, while also asking what it means to work ‘after’ the series of events initiated through Banks’ expeditions and advocacy for the Australian continent and a British prison colony.