Continuing Saint Cloche’s dialogue between artists and practices from across the globe, When Flowers Dream of Machines brings together Sydney-based painter Zaide Harker and Danish-based sculptor Gleb Dusavitskiy.
Spanning painting and sculpture, the exhibition examines nature as an intelligent, adaptive system—one shaped by time, environment and human intervention. For both artists, nature is not a passive subject to be represented, but an active force that determines how a work comes into being. Their practices begin with close attention to organic forms and material histories, then transform them through processes of abstraction, construction and reimagining.
Harker’s new paintings turn to Australian native flora, placing familiar species within surreal and speculative environments. Dense passages of oil paint and gestural palette-knife marks build flowers that appear to shift between botanical and mechanical states. Stems extend like circuitry; petals and organic structures emerge against toxic, hazed fields of colour. The paintings do not illustrate a future in which technology replaces nature. Instead, they propose a more unstable and generative condition in which biological and technological systems become entangled.
At the centre of the series is an interest in the intelligence embedded within the natural world. Australian flora has evolved through complex relationships with climate, fire, insects, birds and Country. Harker draws upon this history of resilience and adaptation while considering a future increasingly shaped by technological systems.
Rather than positioning the natural and technological as opposing forces, Harker holds them in productive tension. His flowers are neither wholly organic nor wholly engineered; they occupy a threshold where growth, mutation and invention become indistinguishable.
Dusavitskiy’s sculptures extend this inquiry into the physical life of material. He presents a series of hand-worked timber works formed from Danish oak, Douglas fir and larch sourced from a family-run forest and sawmill near his home in Højer, Denmark. Where Harker imagines organic forms entering an uncertain technological future, Dusavitskiy begins with matter that already carries the evidence of time.
His process is responsive rather than prescriptive. Knots, bends, scars and irregularities are retained rather than corrected, determining the direction of each sculpture. The timber’s existing structure becomes both constraint and collaborator, allowing the history of the tree to remain visible within its transformed state.
In Echo of Times, Endless Ripples, Inner Forces and Together as One, timber is shaped into fluid, abstract forms that suggest movement, connection and continuity. Their curves and tensions evoke processes of growth, circulation and interdependence, while their material surfaces preserve the marks of weather, age and place. Each sculpture therefore holds two temporalities at once: the life of the tree and the new life it assumes through artistic intervention.
The connection between the artists lies in their shared refusal to treat nature as fixed or merely symbolic. Harker’s paintings transform native flora into speculative organisms, while Dusavitskiy’s sculptures reveal transformation as a negotiation with material history. One looks towards possible futures; the other works through the accumulated past. Both understand form as something that emerges through responsiveness—to growth, resistance, accident and change.
Australian flowers meet Danish timber, not as separate cultural or material references, but as parallel expressions of a broader ecological intelligence. Painting and sculpture become linked through their attention to transformation: the moment when an existing form is neither preserved intact nor completely remade, but carried forward into another state.
When Flowers Dream of Machines considers what remains within transformation—and what new forms become possible when the natural world is treated not as raw material, but as collaborator, guide and generative force.
