ELLA MCGAW: My name is Ella McGaw, and I studied visual arts at Cronulla High School. The inspiration for my body of work was the 2019 and 2020 black summer bushfires. The journey for my body of work began when our house close to Lithgow was surrounded by the bushfires at the end of 2019.

Seeing all the smoke and fires was really terrifying and really scary, especially at night. You could see it all glowing on the escarpments. But luckily, we were really lucky that it didn't come close to our house. From this experience, I started experimenting with the idea of burning, and that led me to obviously trees burning and that was started with paper.

So, I experimented with burning different types of paper and how different types of paper burnt. And then, from there, I began the process of creating and making my own paper. It was about taking aspects of the environment and the land and incorporating that into my paper. So, I went out to our areas that was burnt near our houses, and I gathered ash and charcoal and just parts of the burnt dirt and actually incorporated that into my paper. And that's what you see that coloured the gradient of my paper.

Once I began making all the paper, I encountered lots of problems with actually being able to draw and paint onto the paper because it was really delicate. So, from there, I started experimenting with different things and materials that would stay on my paper. And I eventually landed on acrylic paint and carbon transfer along with light, drawing with a couple of different mediums that would work and be really good for the paper.

I had this entanglement of a narrative that I wanted to express about not only the ecosystem but our community and, as a society, how we're responding to it. And that's when out drawing it reminded me of squiggly gum trees. And from there, this line formed that could hold the narrative of what I was trying to say.

One big drawing that was really graphic and ended up being really messy, and so, I didn't end up doing that, but that worked more with the light and dark because our way of progressing and solving these problems within climate change and us as a society living in a fire country. And then the black was going to be more about what we've lost and how as a society, we should reflect on that and how we still need to talk about it even in light of other things going on.

As you can see in the artwork, every sheet of paper is labelled with a different species name of a plant or animal. Using a colour key, it ranges from dark red, red, green, and lights and browns, which indicate the critically endangered, endangered and vulnerable, and lost or affected species because of the bushfires. Artists that inspired me during the process of making my body of work would be Ildiko, Janet Laurence and Martin Bell.

Martin Bell has a similar process where he draws consecutively over large sheets of paper. And I love Janet Laurence's work, especially in Blindspot. Her ordering of the paper is very similar to mine and how it is presented and how it's seen up on the wall. Advice for curating your body of work. I would start with finding an experience or something that you're really passionate about, and every single time you come up with a new idea about it, keep pushing it, seeing where you could take the work conceptually but also materially and see how the 2 can-- and how the 2 can go hand in hand to make it meaningful.

My plans for the future are to continue studying visual arts at Wollongong University in a double degree with environmental sciences. Finishing the HSC it's been really good, and being selected for ARTEXPRESS has been such an amazing opportunity, and I'm really excited.

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