Vera Möller and the species nobody has discovered yet

Vera Möller makes paintings and sculptures of living things that do not exist. Coral that might be a toadstool, a succulent that might be a sea creature, a cactus covered in polka dots: each is a hybrid of her own invention, made with the care of someone who once drew real specimens for a living. She was born in Bremen, Germany, in 1955, studied biology before she studied art, and moved to Australia in 1986. She has lived and worked in Victoria ever since, and her work has been shown in Australia and in Japan, Finland, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States.

From the microscope to the studio

The science comes first in her story, and it shows in the work. As a teenager growing up in Aachen she wanted to go to art school, but her father was firmly against it, so she studied biology instead, hoping to become a biological illustrator. At Würzburg she was taught biological illustration by a professor who had drawn and painted every plate of a four-volume encyclopaedia of central European butterflies. She later studied microbiology in Munich, where she specialised in freshwater ecology, and as a student researcher on Bavarian lake projects her job was to collect algae samples, identify and count the species under the microscope, and draw them precisely.

That training in patient, exact drawing never left. What changed, after she moved to Melbourne and studied fine art at the Victorian College of the Arts and then took a PhD at Monash University, was the purpose. Instead of recording species that exist, she began making new ones.

What the work looks like

The best-known works are the invented specimens. Some are small sculptures, coral forms and fungi and plant shapes, grouped in clear Perspex boxes in a way that recalls the glass cases of a natural history museum. Others are paintings that render the same kind of imaginary creature in close-up detail. Spots and stripes run through almost everything. Möller has explained that her interest in those patterns grew partly from her family's photograph albums, full of striped and dotted clothes, flags and beach things from holidays on Germany's North Sea islands in the late 1950s and early 1960s. She was also interested in how spots and stripes work in nature, as camouflage, as warning and as a way of being seen.

The look is bright and a little unsettling at once. These hybrids are lovely, but they also suggest mutation, the way a species might change under pollution, warming water or genetic engineering. The Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery has described her specimens as fantasy plants with bright colours and patterns, coral-like, succulent and toadstool forms, placed in existing landscapes.

The reef and the looser paintings

The Great Barrier Reef became a central subject for her in the early 2000s. She developed a long relationship with the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, which commissioned a sculpture from her for an annual award to reef scientists. In 2013 she was artist-in-residence at the University of Queensland's research station on Heron Island. There she placed tiny handmade sculptures among the living coral and photographed them as if they were species not yet discovered, or species that might once have existed. She had done something similar in Kings Wood forest in Kent in 2009 and on the Skullbone Plains in Tasmania's Central Plateau, and has since worked on the rock platforms of Victoria's Bass Strait coast.

The snorkelling on Heron Island changed her painting. In a 2017 interview with Studio International she talked about wanting to break away from the very tight style she had developed and to capture instead the experience of gliding through underwater spaces: light through moving water, layers of transparent seaweed, the missing horizon, iridescence. The resulting canvases are fluid and poured-looking, closer to colour-field painting than to her earlier specimen pictures, though she said she was not consciously working from any other artist.

How to look at a Möller

There are two ways into this work, and they ask for different kinds of attention. Try both in one sitting. Here is a worked example using an imaginary striped specimen painting, about the size of a large book, hung at eye level.

First, look as a biologist would. Give yourself five minutes and a simple brief: describe the creature so that someone who has never seen it could recognise it. How many parts does it have? Is it symmetrical? Where are the stripes thickest? Does the pattern follow the form, wrapping round it like skin, or sit flat across it like printed fabric? Möller once described her own way of looking on a reef walk as moving slowly, standing still often, bending down and turning rocks over. That is a good model for the first pass.

Second, look as a painter would. Step back and ignore what the thing is. Notice the colour relationships, how a stripe of one colour makes the next one buzz, how a dark ground pushes a pale form forward. Ask what the painting is doing to your eye, not what it shows.

Then put the two together. The pleasure of this work is that it is both a convincing record and a complete fiction. The precision makes you believe it; the spots and stripes remind you that someone made it up.

If you know the history, a third way opens. Möller has spoken about the hybrid bouquets of seventeenth-century Dutch still-life painters such as Ambrosius Bosschaert, flowers painted together in one vase that would never have bloomed at the same time. Her invented species work in a similar spirit, and a little time with Dutch still life in a state gallery will sharpen your eye for hers. The looking closely room on this site has more on slow looking of this kind.

Career points

Beyond the training already described, a few documented points stand out. In 1997 she spent three months in Japan on a Keith and Elisabeth Murdoch travelling fellowship, and she has said that the gardens, shrines, food, fashion and museum displays she saw in Kyoto and elsewhere had a lasting influence. Around 2001 she made a series called Labland, photographs of tiny newborn mice she found nesting in her store room, briefly set among her handmade objects on the studio table; the photographs and objects were later shown at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne. The Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery has presented her solo exhibition sea.liquid.sensation.flux.space, and she has taken part in its Front Beach, Back Beach project, in which artists respond to sites and stories of the peninsula.

A closing thought

It is easy to call this work playful, and it is. But the play rests on years of drawing what was really under the lens, and on real worry about what is happening to reefs and rivers. Möller's species are made up. The attention they ask of you is not. For another painter who built a lifetime's work from close attention to Australian ground, read the note on Philip Hunter, or browse the other painter notes.