Inspired by her love of animals, artist Ronelle Reid uses ink, oils and watercolours to create detailed, visual narratives that explore the relationships between animals and their habitats.
Her style is a combination of colourful, naturalist work with quirky compositions that pair species who don’t coexist or share habitats. She invites viewers to ask why the rules of land, air and sea no longer apply, and wonder why fish happily swim through the antlers of a bongo antelope and butterflies flutter around a moray eel.
As a dedicated artist, Ronelle spent countless hours studying animals in museums, using the taxidermic displays to understand and convey their forms. It wasn’t until she started work with RSPCA that her experience with animal welfare gave her a new perspective.
Now, fuelled by this understanding, she combines her formal education in painting, screen and printmaking to plan each composition, purposefully breaking the rules of taxonomic categorisation. In doing so, her work draws attention to the interconnectedness between species and invites viewers to see how they are being forced to adapt in rapidly changing ecosystems, or risk extinction.
These pairings also invite people to engage in the character and personality of the individual animals, challenging them to see them as more than just objects to be studied and classified.
Aware that much of Australia’s rich biodiversity is found exclusively on this continent, and that we have one of the highest rates of extinction globally, Ronelle’s next series will inspire people to learn more about our vulnerable native animals and do more to protect them.
Her quirky, naturalist portrayals preserve and highlight the beauty and diversity of animals right in our backyards of Logan, asking us to imagine if the kookaburra, the koala, or wallaby were lost to us forever.