Gracia Haby and Louise Jennison are exuberant archival eco-artists whose palette embraces the digital collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Public Library, Rijksmuseum, State Library of New South Wales, State Library Victoria, and more. Their preferred media are paper, the artist’s book, and installations; their preferred technique, collage.

Dip and Bob (2021)

Dip and Bob (2021)
Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison
Casebound, softcover with five-panel irregular trim wraparound card. H149 x W110 mm. [72] pages. Edition of 50. Acquired from the artists, 21 February 2026.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Like other works in the collection, Dip and Bob (2021) teases connections between the media of watercolor, artist’s book, performance, and installation. The cover is an original watercolor cover on Fabriano Artistico 300 gsm paper.

The 72 pages of prints on Impact 100% Recycled Uncoated 150gsm derives from a 620 cm long digital collage. Created for the 2021 NGV Melbourne Art Book Fair, its performance element was twofold. First, as the artists explain, the collage was made “in place of a swim”, the local pool being too busy. Second, toward the end of the making, several copies were bound live before the Book Fair attendees. Its installation element, however, is the greatest tease. There is and was no installation of the 620 cm long collage work. It rests in your hands, and you experience it by turning the pages, then turning them back, then turning them forward — like laps in the pool. Or if you happen to photograph the double-page spreads, you can jump out of the pool and look down on them joined end to end.

Their introduction, however, will lure you back into the collage, which is

Underwater, kind of. Yes. Dive in.

Don’t forget to hold your breath. …

Search the collection. Sift the collection. “Water”, Return key.

Invert a forest. A daguerreotype of poplars stretching across the plate could be bands of seaweed. …

A crab from a trade card. Not for the skillet. Zoom in, Moonfish.

The Young Saint John the Baptist hair tendrils ca. 1480–82, repurposed. Papyrus fragment with lines from Homer’s Odyssey, ca. 285–250 B.C., for kelp bands.

Haby and Jennison wear their eco-hearts on their sleeves and admit, or rather assert, “For us, above all, it is not the medium that is always of greatest import, but the message”, which is

Our only chance of a healthy, safe, joyous, and sustainable future is to return to being reciprocal with nature so nature can continue to look after us.

Stand up and fight for the oceans and the waterways.

And yet it is their long-held breath as they create their underwater collage and your breath caught as you paddle forwards and backwards over fore edges and through the collection of human and natural art that will most hold you.

The Remaking of Things (2023)

The Remaking of Things (2023)
Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison
Folded container with tab-and-slot closure, holding belly-band-secured front cover fold out, part of card cover casing a perfect bound book. Container: H186 x W228 x D15 mm. Book: H180 x W222 mm. [36] panels. Edition of 100, of which this is #25. Acquired from Vamp & Tramp, 21 May 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

From 24 May through 20 August 2023, the Ian Potter Centre (NGV Australia) held hosted an installation of The Remaking of Things. This work produced for the exhibition comprises a silvery tab-and-slot folder, holding a casebound softcover artist’s book whose front cover opens into a desktop installation, making you wish for a sip of Alice’s “Drink me” potion or bite of the Caterpillar’s magic mushroom.

Tab-and-slot folder made of Silver Metalised Polyester satin paper 300 gsm, router cut, printed on a swissQprint inkjet printer. Image from Nicholas Caire‘s Fairy scene at the Landslip, Black’s Spur (c. 1878)

Although the work continues their archival poetics, drawing on “100 individual pieces in the NGV collection, spanning painting and photography by way of ceramics and silverware, textiles and works on paper”, it has its origin in Haby & Jennison’s restored eucalyptus forest habitat for the Grey-heading flying fox, the animal featured on the “wall” that serves for the front cover.

Front cover with and without belly band.

As the front cover unfolds, a double door appears, cut into one of the other walls. “Walking” to the right around the walls, you see the images that, enlarged, occupied the exhibition walls in Melbourne.

Within the exhibition rooms, a 24-minute for 24 hours sound track played as the lighting changed. Within the book, photographs of the exhibition rooms provide a sense of the visual experience and its scale.

The images within the book are likely to send you back to the images on your desktop installation. There, it is much easier to register James Sowerby‘s etching Tetratheca juncea (1793), John Lewin’s Warty-face Honey-sucker (1822), Richard Bunbury‘s Green native fuchsia (1844), Anne Paulson’s Sketches of Victorian bush flowers (c. 1861), Fanny Anne Charsley‘s The Wildflowers of Melbourne (1867), Eugene von Guérard‘s Ferntree gully (1867), Tom Humphrey‘s Summer walk (c. 1888), F.E. Striezel‘s Kookaburra carving (1915), A. Shelden‘s Possum and banksia (1920s), E.G. Adamson‘s Snow coral (1930s-40s), Grace Cossington Smith’s Bottlebrushes (1935), NASA’s Lunar Crater (1969), and the dozens of others listed in the center of the book that can be found on the NGV website. As Haby & Jennison indicate in the work, they “invite you to enter the pages of the book in a similar spirit as you would the gallery”. Across time, etchings, paintings, carvings, inkwells, snuff boxes, glass plate negatives, digital photographs and a host of other artefacts, they create a complex habitat of interconnectedness of art and species.

Given that aim, it is surprising that the fold-out cover is constructed for viewing around rather than within. Double-sided printing of the cover might have done the trick and offered an additional opportunity to show the change of lighting.

Looking for Green, Remaining Hopeful (2024)

Looking for Green, Remaining Hopeful (2024)
Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison
Accordion book. H135 x W92 mm (closed), W802 mm (open). [9] panels. Edition of 75, of which this is #4. Acquired from the artists, 21 February 2026.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

World Book Night’s 2024 theme was “in praise of birds”. Using old postcards from various locations and cut outs collected over the years, Gracia Haby and Louise Jennison selected 45 birds to arrange in this vertical collage in response. The Indigo Digital CMYK used on ecoStar 100 gsm for the body and ecoStar 300 gsm for the cover delivers the vibrant avian colors against a chroma-key-like green screen background. The choice of the green screen effect has layers of significance. One layer is its obvious echo of the “green” choice of 100% recycled paper. Another, not so obvious, requires the textual explanation from the covers:

A green screen enables video makers to fill in the background or environment behind actors after filming. Haby & Jennison’s mimicry of it says that we need to provide these avian actors with more befitting environments than those in the sepia and gray toned backgrounds. Against the minatory background, the exuberant “motley assortment of birds” points in signposts to the “potential environment” left to be filled in on the green screen.

Despite its format, this is not a perforated pack of postcards to be detached and dispatched. You want to see and keep it all at once, as prompted by the vertical zigzagging against the green screen. But you will want also to examine it panel by panel, as prompted by the key on the covers and the detail of the images. In doing so, you sense the celebration and take the warning that this conference of birds being celebrated may disperse into extinction as has happened with the Norfolk kākā (last recorded sighting, about 1851), Carolina parakeet (last recorded sighting, February 1918), Newton’s parakeet (last recorded sighting, 14 August 1875), Bonon wood-pigeon (last recorded sighting, 15 September 1889), and Great Auk (last recorded sighting, 3 June 1844).

Bilateral Symmetry (2024)

Bilateral Symmetry (2024)
Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison
Self-enclosing barn-fold artist’s book with tab-and-slot closure, pamphlet stitched, and pop-up components. H240 x W174 mm. [24] pages. Edition of 100. Acquired from the artists, 21 February 2026.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Bilateral Symmetry (2024) is the most successful of the four of artist’s books in the collection. Every element supports its exploration of perception and bilateral symmetry: the sewing, the barn-fold structure, cut outs and pop-ups, the page spreads and alignment, the choice of imagery from the natural world and architecture, and presentation of text across moth-shaped pages.

From the start, it combines surprising trompe l’oeil with startling juxtapositions. On the front cover, a bookmark aligns with the architecture behind a ruined arch overseen by a giant lacewing perched on a tree-size plant leaf.

Opening the barn-fold book reveals a new set of perspectival surprises. Inside, there are two booklets facing each other. The edge of the recto page of the booklet on the left aligns with the edge of the verso page of the booklet on the right to form an image across a four-page spread. Between the two foregrounded columns and statues, we see a neatly divided and aligned building in a small formal landscape. Beyond the building and landscape, an arcade with statuary curves symmetrically to the left and to the right. In fact, the arcade extends in a circle that comes around to the columns and statues through which we are looking. But the proportions are impossible or, at least, surreal. Of course, the huge dragonfly, also neatly split by the pages meeting in the center, offers a strange perspective especially alongside the collage of other insects. Even the marbled columns offer peculiarities. Some are rounded, some are squared, some start square at the foot but end rounded at the capital. And the statuary, collaged with insects, are shadowed with bright marbled patterns.

With the turn to the next set of facing spreads, the two statues and view through the arcade disappear, yet the moths that were posed against them remain as lepidopteral pop-ups against double doors in the middle of seemingly detached greenhouse walls. On the left, a flying squirrel attributed to Louisa Atkinson (ca. 1849-72) hangs from a branch intruding through an open arch in the wall. Diversity and trompe l’oeil strain at the work’s bilateral symmetry.

Pop-up on the left, Catocala albo-fasciata. Pop-up on the right, Catocala fusca. From Helena and Harriet Scott’s Australian Lepidoptera (1893).

The final spread on this side of the book displays further distortions challenging our perception — even of bilateral symmetry but somehow nevertheless underscoring the theme. The Scotts’ pop-up moths, each centered a booklet’s spine, are flanked by Atkinson‘s far too small ringtailed oppossum on the left and by Gerard Kreft‘s far too large water rat to the right, peering down on the scene. The huge mantis in the center hangs mid air against the formal tree lined garden abnormally far in the background. The garden is perspectivally more distant than the domed edifice behind it, and an impossibly large rodent peeps over it. Although the central rodent and mantis are not symmetrically divided, and although the scenes to the left and right of the spine are not symmetrical, the central spine bisects the garden and dome precisely. Likewise the left and right spines bisect the Scotts’ moths precisely, underscoring the theme of bilateral symmetry. Meanwhile, the spreads have reiterated the point about the variety and diversity of insects, flora, and mammals.

On the reverse side of the book, between the splayed-out back and front covers of the two booklets, a cut out moth with wings spread disappears in trompe l’oeil fashion into the facade against which it has alighted. Above the moth, the two-word title of the book appears on two engraved banners hanging over the two parallel open archways centered between two shuttered archways. Two Harriet Scott Emperor Gum moths hover in the two archways shown on the lower lobes of the cut out moth’s wings. (Did I mention how every element supports the exploration of bilateral symmetry?)

The book’s text appears on the reverse side of the cut out moth’s wings. As you turn to the first wing/page of text or turn to the last wing/page, you may notice how the two Emperor Gum moths have “jumped” from the cut out’s wings to the background underneath each wing. A sort of slow motion persistence of vision, it is another perceptual trick alongside the trompe l’oeil of the cut out moth.

The first paragraph of text picks up on this theme of visual legerdemain by recalling the first flea circus impresario Mark Scalliot. That is a rhetorical means of introducing Bilateral Symmetry as a “theatre for insects” and posing the depicted insects as “fellow exhibitors”, which in turn is a rhetorical sleight of hand by which Haby and Jennison place themselves and the insects on an equal footing as performers and artists. The equation elevates the insects from the hucksterism of the flea circus — “Not for them an ivory “landau with figures of six horses attached to it ….” and, in the next paragraph, even raises these performers over Robert Hooke’s fleas as large as “elephants seen with the naked eye”. The exhibitors of Bilateral Symmetry invite you to better Hooke’s microscope by crouching “by a potted plant and behold[ing] the wonderful world of insects, thrumming”.

Leaning into entomomorphism, the artists invite us “[d]own an ecological porthole [to] flitter, paying attention to the messages the ears on our chests might receive were we a mantis”. Familiar by now with the artists’ message, we know this leads to the ecological observation of declining diversity, but up to this point, their artistry has been primarily about visual perception. This is not to gainsay the message, but as important as the message is, their marvelous handling of the media (the archival sources, the innovative book structure, and the collage) and reorienting of our perspective do more than simply make us receptive to it. Only in its final two paragraphs does the text exhort the reader to care and do something about the decline in insect diversity. The paragraphs preceding them conjure a world of insect perception and behavior that is as surreal as the whimsical perceptual distortions of the collage. The collage may include insects registered as endangered, but the text does not identify them. If text and collage were to have included endangered insects such as the Angled Tiger butterfly, Beautiful Petaltail dragonfly, Illidge’s Ant-blue (Butterfly), Queen Alexandra’s Birdwing Butterfly, Fan-winged Katydids, or Zaprochilus ninae (Bush crickets), might we have arrived at the same exhortation on our own?

With its blend of architectural ruins and artificial landscaping with oversized and undersized insects at various stages of metamorphosis, Bilateral Symmetry urges a shift of perspective in our perception of nature and our interconnectedness. With its structural embodiment of bilateral symmetry and diversity, it offers a rich example of the perceptual and perspectival shift it urges.

Further Reading

“Carol Barton“. 10 August 2024. Books On Books Collection.

“Caren Florance“. 30 April 2026. Books On Books Collection. In particular, see L OO P (2019).

“Ernst Huebner“. 21 July 2023. Books On Books Collection.

“Willow Legge“. 16 February 2021. Books On Books Collection.

“On the Origin of Species“. 12 February 2017. Bookmarking Book Art.

“Philip Zimmermann“. 14 January 2020. Books On Books Collection. In particular, see Melt (2023) and Landscapes of the Late Anthropocene (2017).

Davis, Brian. 2024. “Part One: The Rise of Multimodal Book-Archives“. College Book Art Association. Accessed 24 November 2025.