Where Nature Meets the Archive: Madeleine Kelly at Künstlerhaus Bethanien
Image credit: Installation view of works by Madeleine Kelly on display as part of The First Killing of a Butterfly at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, 11 June - 9 August 2026. Photo: Ludger Paffrath
Australian artist Madeleine Kelly is known for her vibrant, research-driven practice, which explores the intersections of history, science, ecology and systems of knowledge. Through painting, sculpture, textiles and installation, Kelly investigates the ways in which the natural world has been observed, classified and collected, often revealing the cultural and political frameworks that sit behind these acts of documentation.
The First Killing of a Butterfly, which was show at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, builds on research undertaken during Kelly's year-long residency in Berlin, where she spent time studying natural history collections, archives and museum holdings connected to nineteenth-century German naturalist Amalie Dietrich. Drawing on this research, Kelly examines the complex legacy of Dietrich's decade in Australia, where plants, insects and birds were collected and transported to Europe as scientific specimens.
The title of your exhibition, The First Killing of a Butterfly, is both poetic and unsettling. What does it evoke for you, and how does it frame the ideas explored throughout the exhibition?
Since I began this residency, I have focused on the legacy of German naturalist Amalie Dietrich (1821–1891, b. Siebenlehn, Saxony), whose archive of Australian natural specimens includes one of the largest collections of avifauna ever amassed, and who discovered many species new to Western science.
The title draws directly from Gertrud Enderlein’s 1955 storybook about Dietrich, in which ‘the killing of the first beautiful butterfly’ describes Dietrich’s role as a collector. To me, it’s a somewhat clouded expression, reflecting her time in colonial Australia, when she collected plants, animals and Indigenous cultural items, including, disturbingly, human remains. It was the height of social Darwinism, and while Dietrich was once celebrated in Germany as a pioneering woman, she is now often regarded as the ‘Angel of Black Death’. A central challenge in this project has been how to represent her violence without repeating it.
My painting The Lies, 2026, pictures her catching a butterfly. The silhouetted figure is taken from GDR comic maker Bernd Günther’s very powerful image of Amalie running with a butterfly net. When combined with the beauty of a repetitive crystalline pattern, we see the net as grid, net as order and net as collective memory.
The idea of a killing net suggests a kind of conceptual violence. Her mother introduced her to the use of medicinal plants, while her husband, Wilhelm A. S. Dietrich, provided her with training in natural history. They married in 1846 and Amalie learned the Linné system from her husband. The Linnaean system of classification has provided humanity with an amazing body of universal knowledge; however, it is also associated with linguistic imperialism. Our collective memory is based on knowledge obtained through the categorical logic of classing humans and non-humans. The title The First Killing of a Butterfly captures the relationship between death and memory. And of course, the ephemeral butterfly is the classic memento mori.
Image credit: The Lies 2026, pigment, binder, acrylic and oil on polyester, 150 x 110 cm.
Amalie Dietrich's legacy sits at the centre of this exhibition. What first drew you to her story, and what compelled you to revisit it through painting rather than historical or archival research alone?
During my residency at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, I wanted to continue my exploration of birds and language and develop a new body of work in which the two interlace as forms of kinship. Berlin offers a unique context for this, as it is a global centre for contemporary art and a city with extraordinary ornithological resources, such as the Natural History Museum, with its 200,000 bird specimens. Here, a mounted specimen of an Australian Oriental plover, Charadrius veredus, collected by Dietrich, caught my attention. The didactic panel briefly explained that she had travelled to Australia. This piqued my interest, as I was born in Germany and migrated to Australia.
To support her daughter, Charitas Bischoff (b. 1848), who was fostered in Hamburg, Dietrich worked for the Godeffroy Museum as a field collector while in Australia. About 15 years after Dietrich’s death, Charitas wrote her mother’s biography, Amalie Dietrich: Ein Leben (Amalie Dietrich: A Life). At the exhibition entrance, the book is open to the only page illustrating Dietrich’s procurement of Indigenous remains. Although the practice of taking artefacts and human bodies was widespread at the time, even as a moral relativist, I found her actions unacceptable and almost abandoned the project. I then began working around her story through the notion of being a field naturalist.
Image credit: Book: Bischoff, Charitas. Amalie Dietrich: Ein Leben. Berlin: Grote, 1927.
I chose painting to revisit her story because, as one of the most versatile art forms, it is an excellent way to contain and represent the entangled complexities of her life. A letter from Schmeltz to Dietrich states: ‘Continue to arrange all necessities as previously and give us the pleasure of sending big new consignments soon. Catalogue IV of our Museum will hopefully appear next month, full of objects from you’ (Schmeltz, J. D. E., quoted in Sumner, p. 51). In my painting Full of Objects from You, 2026, four swans encircle a womb, which, when viewed from afar, also forms an artist’s palette. The painting could seem a luminous poetry of reproduction and liveliness, but since their beaks remove eggs, it could also be an example of the choices women make between motherhood and work. Dietrich was striving for survival, yet also driven by ambition, aspiring to collect ‘treasures that no one had secured before me’, just as an artist aims to paint an image never previously seen. Painting can create layers of meaning that invite viewers to connect with universal ideas and emotions, helping us interpret complex situations.
Image credit: Full of Objects from You 2026, acrylic on polyester, 95 x 80 cm.
Your work often begins with meticulous research into museum collections, scientific archives and natural history. How do you balance the empirical process of research with the intuitive, speculative nature of painting?
It is a balancing act! I start formally and proceed to the empirical. Formal concerns are more important to me than concepts, but when a form presents a concept in a surprising way, it’s magical.
The ground sets the tone for the image. I can block out form and play with the weight of colour. Hues often melt into each other; yellows remain bright. The colours must shine for darkening empirical figures.
In recent times I have geometricized my forms, which helps create structural affinities that allude to the contingency of knowledge.
My painting Sedges Have Edges, 2026, depicts a grass-like flowering plant known as sedge, specifically one collected and named after Dietrich, Cyperus dietrichiae Boeckeler. If you roll the stem of a sedge plant between your fingers, you will feel three distinct, sharp angles. I chose to represent this single specimen in fine linear detail solely because it fitted into the formal logic of the triangular-
patterned fabric support.
Geometric logic gives rise to a very interesting range of boundary situations, where nature, animals and humans coexist and flourish—so, for me, geometry is the best mode of representing empirical knowledge as well as other situations, like the scandalous wrongdoing of Dietrich’s work with human remains. I feel it is not my story to tell, so I paint it indirectly. The more allegorical Spiral Notation, 2026, depicts Dietrich’s osseous shipment as shells, and birds become scroll-like notes with marks on their bodies that suggest a semiotic sign system.
Image credit: Sedges Have Edges (Cyperus haspan dietrichiae) 2026, acrylic on cotton, 90 x 80 cm.
Image credit: Spiral Notation 2026, acrylic and oil on canvas, 90 x 80 cm.
Many of the birds and botanical specimens you depict were collected through acts of colonial extraction. How do you navigate the ethical complexities of representing these histories without simply reproducing the systems of classification that created them?
My large painting Bird Trap Line, 2026, embodies this conundrum by honouring the life and death of taxidermy birds. It recalls historical images of the conference or assembly of birds. However, instead of branches, the birds sit on interlocking geometric circles, their structures and connections suggesting an intricate mesh of delicate branches akin to a taxonomy of remembrance. Instead of a fixed grid, order bleeds: a form of care within violent structures. There are no insides or outsides to the interwoven lines—birds sit all over them as if residing in an ecological grid, rather than an objectifying grid.
The birds in this painting are based on those from The Bird Hall at the Naturkundemuseum Bamberg, all collected/killed by Amalie Dietrich in 1872, with the majority being from Port Mackay. Her reconstructed bird collection totals 266 specimens, the largest assembled by a single person in Australia. I reanimate the absent bird, the killed bird, but hopefully the title Bird Trap Line provokes questions such as: What bird? Which branch? What means? What trap? Whether mist nets, clap nets, guns or sticky birdlime glue applied to branches, the specimens made me question the gap between creativity and morality.
The birds’ postures are based on images from the Bamberg catalogue. Some are solid and some transparent, to strain the distinction between the metaphysical, erasure and presence—the woodcock appears as if blown from glass.
If Dietrich’s actions were accepted in her time, I wondered what moral catastrophes from our time will be reflected on in 100 years. An immediate example is the grave issue of the 30 billion chickens living in factory farms for our consumption. Colonial extraction is inherent in most of what we consume. That tension carries into my bird sculptures, made with encaustic wax on recycled containers; the idea of ‘taking from nature’ reappears formally as I explore the relationship between abstraction and extraction, both grounded in acts of removal. They form a bizarre taxonomy of their own.
Image credit: Grey Heron and Waterfowl Kin (detail) 2026, encaustic wax on cardboard,500 x 75 cm.
Image credit: Bird Trap Line 2026,pigment, binder and oil paint on polyester,185 x 155 cm.
Grids, taxonomies and scientific ordering recur throughout your work, yet they are consistently disrupted by gesture, colour and abstraction. What interests you about the tension between order and instability?
Care and tension shape forms of relationality, and this is important in a time of ecocide, when we need to stretch our imaginations to consider all animals as equal and to recognise that social transformation is possible. Using painting to embrace metaphor, the grids and orders in my work are not immutable. A brushed line obtrudes out of order, the pigment transitions from concentrated to diluted, and sometimes the paint fragments when it enters the continuous network of lines. By combining bright colours and soft, muted tones, I make the colours reverberate. These effects are interesting records of changing zones of entanglement. Like the earth, a painting is a site of entanglement itself. Humans (and some non-humans) are relational; we are constantly navigating the yes-or-no logic of decisions.
Birds have become recurring protagonists in your practice. What do they allow you to explore that perhaps other subjects do not?
Birds bring powerful symbolism into a world by connecting the earth with the sky. Their worlds are based in deep time, but they also symbolise a posthuman world. Like a memento mori, they remind us to pay attention to their beating wings, songs and calls.
In paintings, birds lend form to the crystalline; they shimmer and sparkle across the sea or become cubist facets offering multiple perspectives, like the frontiers of language, which are never clear cut. Birds are also nodes within conceptual networks – like language, they are variable and relative.
The wings of flying birds provide the ideal anatomy to embody meaning. Throughout history, the creation of meaning arises from a split, a union, or an oscillation between two factors. I love the tension between the surface and the underside of their wings.
Your paintings move fluidly between scientific illustration, abstraction and symbolism. How do these different visual languages coexist in your work, and what possibilities emerge from placing them in dialogue?
Evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis once wrote, ‘life learned long ago to recognise itself’. In my work, recognition becomes possible within the grid that functions as a universal structure. Its geometric logic creates formal unity while revealing the grammar of the image’s construction. Elements drawn from scientific illustration—transparency, floating forms and cross-sections—all coexist in this space.
The interlocking grid patterns become a way to explore multispecies ecological relationships and the consequences of environmental loss. Threads of light, shadow, code and diagram interlace across the surface, suggesting connections between living systems. Bringing these visual languages together is the closest I can come to representing biosemiotics—the ways meaning is generated and exchanged across life forms.
Within the grid, figures undergo an evolution of sorts, their interrelated shapes suggesting a common formal ancestry (homology). By playing with their morphology, I flag biosemiosis, where sign and life converge. The semiotics of forms extends to other materialities, such as trace, and to light determining the absence of a presence. Geometry may also be considered a basic indexical code and basis of biosemiosis.
Collect, Collect! Gather 2026 is a requiem for biodiversity. These Rorschach-like monoprints are made by placing pigment onto damp fabric, then folding and pressing it to create mirrored forms. As colour bleeds through the fibres, images of living beings emerge. Like St Veronica’s veil, each fabric fragment becomes a trace of a specimen—an ecological imprint of life. In producing over 50 monoprints, I created my own living collection, drawing a parallel between artist and scientist.
Image credit: Collect, Collect! Gather 2026, binder and pigment on textile, 9 parts, approximately 50 x 60 cm each.
During your residency in Berlin you worked directly with museum collections that hold specimens gathered during the colonial period. Did encountering these objects in person change your understanding of the histories they embody?
Yes, once I encounter an object, it’s a completely different experience from seeing a two-dimensional image on a screen. On 11 January 2025, I visited Dietrich’s hometown of Siebenlehn, where there is an exhibition in the Rathaus with some of her collections—not only birds and plants but also large numbers of exotic fish, reptiles, sea stars and corals. One can see the full kit of her scientific mission—all the instruments to dry, press, skin, preserve, label and pack the specimens. Instead of photographs (few exist), we see her cursive handwriting labelling each species. I saw her idealised as the outstanding field naturalist that she was in her time. Fifty taxidermy birds, carefully posed, demonstrate her dedication to conveying their ‘liveliness’. A small ‘ethnological’ collection is disturbingly familiar.
In Berlin, at the Museum für Naturkunde, I arranged access to a mounted skeleton of Trichoglossus moluccanus (rainbow lorikeet), collected by Dietrich in Rockhampton, Australia (1863–73). I drew the skeleton from several angles, but I spent most time drawing vertebrae on an interlocking circle pattern, discovering that emphasising different configurations of circles could become an abstract backbone. Painting the spine with precisely modulated high tones continued my deep exploration of colour. The spine appears monumental beside the figures below, drawn from Alfred Hund’s print in Gertraud Enderlein’s Die Frau aus Siebenlehn (1955), where she is collecting ‘with a soft shiver of reverence’.
Dietrich’s rainbow lorikeet spine became a metaphor for the connection between life and death she explored. Closely encountering the bird inspired me to exaggerate its scale, giving it more presence.
Image credit: Rainbow Lorikeet 2026, acrylic on canvas, 300 x 95 cm.
Your practice engages with museums as both repositories of knowledge and sites of colonial power. What role do you think contemporary artists can play in reinterpreting institutional histories and collections?
Invoking such histories through art can mediate violence and care. Art can remind us that the power of knowledge we exchange is built on extraction and subjugation, while also presenting desire, fascination and beauty. We can grapple with huge subjects in intimate ways. Then again, material encounters allow us to explore how meaning is made, the flow of metaphor, the dynamic messiness of received knowledge and its contextual beauty.
Across your exhibitions there seems to be an ongoing interest in transformation—whether of objects, histories or systems of knowledge. Do you see painting as a way of restoring, questioning or reimagining the archive?
I consider all my paintings as transforming the archive.
My PhD exegesis established the potential for a methodology based on an aesthetic derived from the descriptive methods outlined in Michel Foucault’s seminal work The Archaeology of Knowledge. By applying the usually discursive method to the realm of images, I developed a meta-archaic aesthetic.
Looking beyond The First Killing of a Butterfly, where do you see your research leading next? Are there other archives, histories or natural systems that you feel compelled to investigate?
I’m interested in representations of violence and care. How can we develop sign systems that balance both those tendencies? I’m also interested in other female scientists, their relationship to the cosmic world, the quest for signs as essence, or essential truth. I will return to Lynn Margulis and her circles soon.
And I will continue my explorations of birds and language.
Kelly is a Senior Lecturer at Sydney College of the Arts.
@madeleine_kelly
bethanien.de
