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We have been collaborating since 1999, making artists’ books, zines, collages, stories, prints, and drawings. Besotted still, it appears, with paper for its adaptable, foldable, cut-able, concealable, revealing nature, using an armoury of play, the poetic and familiar too, with the intention of luring you into our A(rtists’ books) to Z(ines). As artists and wildlife carers, our practice frequently concerns the natural world, addressing themes of conservation and biodiversity.
Based in Melbourne, Australia, visitors: Naarm, we work from home. Our collaboration is one based on harmony.
Yours in paper roll,
Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison -
Our work can be found in the collections of:
Art Gallery of Ballarat; Art Gallery of New South Wales; Artspace Mackay; Banyule City Council; Burnie Regional Art Gallery; City of Whitehorse; Charles Sturt University; Deakin University Library; Gladstone Regional Art Gallery; Gold Coast City Art Gallery; Latrobe Regional Gallery; Maroondah City Council; Melbourne Museum; Melbourne University Library; Merri-bek Art Collection; Monash University Library; Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery; National Gallery of Australia; National Gallery of Victoria; National Library of Australia; Print Council of Australia; RMIT University Library; Royal Perth Hospital; State Library of New South Wales;State Library Victoria; State Library of Queensland; University of Wollongong; Warrnambool Art Gallery; Tate (UK); University of the West of England (UK); Cynthia Sears Collection, Bainbridge Island Museum of Art (USA); Baylor University (USA); Environmental Design Library, Berkeley University of California (USA); Indiana University, Wells Library (USA); North Dakota State University (USA); Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections, Ohio University (USA); ACA Library of Savannah College of Art & Design (USA); Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University (USA); UCLA Young Library (USA); Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (USA); and private collections.
We decided early on in our collaboration, through an organic process, not to polish the same skills. We naturally lent towards different things and now bring those different things together to make work not possible without the other. Working this way, a third work is made that belongs to us both. A work that we now share with you.
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Our work has been commissioned by:
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To try to make change for the better
We make a monthly donation to The Nature Conservancy Australia to protect the habitat of the Northern quoll, and Seed, Australia’s first Indigenous youth climate network, for “a just and sustainable future with strong cultures and communities, powered by renewable energy”.
We make annual donations to Bush Heritage Australia and other local and international non-profit organisations. -
Because all things are connected
Alongside our work, as of 2024, we are Tiny but Wild, a licensed wildlife shelter based, like our studio, in our home in North Fitzroy.
After being foster carers for RSPCA Victoria, 2017–2021, and Grey-headed flying-fox carers for Bat Rescue Bayside, 2020–2023, this next step seemed inevitable.
Writing, too, about dance for Fjord Review (since 2012).
For us, above all, it is not the medium that is always of greatest import, but the message. And so, we use found imagery and acquired scenery in our artists’ books, collages, prints, and more recently animated collages and installations, alongside our own drawings, for what they can enable us to say, and what we hope you might in turn feel. Though, of course, what you feel is entirely up to you, and to this end we favour open endings above all.
From the intimate to the epic in scale, you can see in our work what you will. You can make of our comprised scenarios what you will. You can see fragments of your very own self. You can see your own link with nature. You can see human nature reflected in the movements of the characters. You can see charm, absolute. Along the way, some people have seen our zines to be artists’ books, or our ‘this’ to be ‘that’, and as this is something beyond our control, we’re fine with that. Like anything, the closer you look, the more you see.
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Specimen 1963
A Potter Museum of Art commission for A Velvet ant, a flower and a bird exhibition curated by Chus Martínez
A Velvet ant by name, a wasp by family, so visual and textural is the image conjured. An ant who is a wasp. A wasp who is soft. Who decided this was so? Do the Velvet ants agree?
Thursday 19th of February – Saturday 6th of June, 2026 -
The remaking of things
Commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) for Melbourne Now.
At the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, our large-scale collage was drawn from 100 works in the NGV Collection. The scene depicted a pocket of restored eucalyptus forest habitat, with cyclic sound and lighting design signalling gradual transitions from morning to night and back again. -
How will they know there's no-one left
As the red curtain falls away, we invite you to peep through the central hole of our first ever peepshow artists’ book. Beneath a bewitching moon, what will you see?
Currently on display as part of the biennial WAMA Art Prize 2025 exhibition, at WAMA, the National Centre for Environmental Art. -
Bower
We were commissioned to create artwork for Genevieve Lacey’s Bower, “a project inspired by bowerbirds’ obsessive collecting habits, and their ability to build magical architecture out of fragments”.
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Restoring corridors
Because all things are connected, in this artists’ book, you, as the reader, can, piece by leaf, connect and strengthen green corridors to habitat, ensuring biodiversity can flourish. This act of regeneration can be read in multiple states of growing, as wild animals return and pollinators thrive.
Restoring corridors was exhibited, in part, in the 2024 National Works on Paper exhibition at Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery. -
Genesis Baroque's new season
We were commissioned to create artwork for Genesis Baroque’s four performances Concerti Grossi, Paris Quartets, Dresden Concerti, and Fête Champêtre.
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Something reverberated
There were once trees growing under the roads. There are still creeks flowing beneath the directional pathways we’ve imposed. Patches of green remain, here and there. Pieces of what was, though dimmer, diminished. A jigsaw forest that hints at what could have been, should have been, and echoes the sprung rhythm words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, “After-comers cannot guess the beauty been”.
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Bracketed by light
In many ways, this artists’ book is because of, and for, six animals we recently fostered and are currently fostering, for their release back into the wild.
To those who require foraging resources and roosting sites.
To the ingenious ecological kindness of the pollinators and seed dispersers.
The echolocators catching insects on the wing. The leaf-consuming fuel-reducers. -
A Hemline of Sky, Forest, and Water Through Smoke
Because through action comes hope, we’ve created a series of artists’ books which require the reader to take action in order to see the full collage clearly.
The reader will need to tear open the perforated fore-edge of each page spread to see through the smoke, to see what lies beneath, or ahead, or in the past.
Echoing Sir David Attenborough’s words that “If we don’t take action, the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon”, without action, all will be lost. -
Through a glass eye
A body of etchings and lithographs, produced with APW Printers at Australian Print Workshop, Melbourne, as part of Australian Print Workshop’s French Connections project curated by APW Director Anne Virgo OAM.
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The remaking of things, artists' book
What if you could grow a forest from a collection. What if you could weave a floor to ceiling landscape from E. G. Adamson’s Snow coral (1930s–1940s) and Louisa Anne Meredith’s Study for gum-flowers and ‘love’ (c. 1860). Slide Tom Roberts’s She-oak and sunlight (1889) alongside Tom Humphrey’s Summer walk (c. 1888), and glimpse Grace Cossington-Smith’s Bottlebrushes (1935) through the foliage.
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Ripples in the Open
An expanded collage commissioned especially for ArtSpace at Realm, in which we call upon our love of cinema and collecting.
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Where to now?
Can we dream it? enquired the lantern bugs is a variation of our unique-state artists’ book, Can we dream it? An edition of 100, it will be launched from our stall at the forthcoming 2026 NGV Melbourne Art Book Fair.
Including
Wildlife Victoria Rescuers and Volunteers, 2026
Sanctuary: 2026 Re-assemble Art Education Conference keynote presentation
9.6 metres in length, our single-sided concertina artists’ book, Can we dream it?, folded at 300mm intervals, unfurls like a hyphal thread. Housed in a paper cover, cut by hand, and exhibited as part of Entanglements with Fungi: Life, Death, and Renewal at WAMA, 2026.
Including
Gardening Australia: My Garden Path segment, 2026
This exhibition can be seen as a garden of knowledge, structured around three familiar figures from nature — a Velvet ant, a flower, and a bird. These figures represent a parliament of beings, each carrying symbolic and metaphorical weight that encourage us to reimagine what intelligence means.
— Chus Martínez, Curator
Commission for A velvet ant, a flower and a bird, The Potter Museum of Art, 2026
The Metro Tunnel Creative Program: A fleeting sense of
A fleeting sense of (extended), Slow Read, Town Hall Gallery 2026
Including
New Metro Tunnel artwork raises awareness of threatened species, CBD News, 2025
Slowly and Deliberately, Rachel Keir-Smith, Town Hall Gallery, 2026
A suite of Salvaged Relatives especially for Plant Life, Stockroom Kyneton
The line between earth & sky
Juniper & the Berries
(Imagined) field notes, World Book Night 2025
Here is something that might have happened, for The Earth is Us, Earth Day 2025
Because of our inertia for Burning Inside, a print exchange folio and exhibition project curated by Rona Green and Thomas A Middlemost, 2025
Reel, an online viewing space, featuring variations of original works on paper and large scale collages in a different format: a continuous digital reel, 2020–2025
Restoring corridors, taken up again, was unzipped and released into the wild at the eleventh Melbourne Art Book Fair, 2025.
Including
Restoring Corridors Collage Workshop with Gracia and Louise, NGV, 2025
How will they know there’s no-one left?, our first peepshow book released into the wild at the eleventh Melbourne Art Book Fair, 2025.
The remaking of things second telling for WAMA Foundation
The Australian Jazz Museum: Tiny but Wild
Including
Remaking Home, collage activity
Bat Massive: A Nocturnal Assembly of Art, Music, and Bats, presented by Abbotsford Convent, Wildlife Victoria, and 3RRR
Melbourne City of Literature Office: Walking the City of Literature map
Fjord Review: POESIS collage
Competing choreographies: 10 years of the Keir Choreographic Award collage for publication
Including
From Dreamweaver, presented as part of Art Enterprise Workshop for the School of Art, RMIT University, 2024
Restoring corridors is a multi-panelled, double-sided artists’ book that when hung on the gallery wall makes an interchangeable, reversible 100cm x 300cm slice of biodiversity in flux.
Including
An extract from Kelly Fliedner's A message, a Point of Connection, a Gesture to Where We Are, from Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery’s National Works on Paper 2024 catalogue
This time around, our fellow exhibitors, the insects, all, momentarily pressed within our artists’ book, Bilateral symmetry, are untethered and unglued upon the unfolding paper stage. And all weighing no more, it is estimated, than 1662 grains of gold, once bound in book form.
Including
Gloriously Wild: How artists Gracia Haby and Louise Jennison opened a tiny wildlife shelter in their backyard, Brita Frost, The Lost Island, 2024
The challenge we set: to use what we had to make something especially for World Book Night 2024’s theme, In praise of birds.
Bower Ashton Library, UWE Bristol, City Campus at Bower Ashton, Bristol, UK
Including
Q & A for RMIT University’s School of Art students Rain Richardson, Sherin Prawira, and Alannah Borg, 2024
Genesis Baroque’s 2024 season
Genesis Baroque’s 2023 season
Genesis Baroque’s 2022 production of George Frideric Handel’s Acis & Galatea
Chatter, rattle, Noddy turns overhead, for the 2024 RMIT Print Exchange Folio
Pollinators, Remy & Pip, for the Australian Print Workshop’s 40x40 survey exhibition
Where we can encounter each other, for the 2023 RMIT Print Exchange Folio
By hoot and Glide, for Whereabouts: A Print Exchange Folio for Rona Green, Art Gallery of Ballarat
What if you could grow a forest from a collection. What if you could weave a floor to ceiling landscape from E. G. Adamson’s Snow coral (1930s–1940s) and Louisa Anne Meredith’s Study for gum-flowers and ‘love’ (c. 1860). Slide Tom Roberts’s She-oak and sunlight (1889) alongside Tom Humphrey’s Summer walk (c. 1888), and glimpse Grace Cossington-Smith’s Bottlebrushes (1935) through the foliage.
Including
Erratic Temporality, Sophie Cunningham, The Melbourne Now broadsheet, 2023
Turn a bird
Brilliant Gathering
Hold
Recall
Including,
Bird’s Eye View: Perspectives on the Art and Science of Ornithology, presented as part of Melbourne Rare Book Week, Melbourne Museum, 2024
A green pocket of restored eucalyptus forest habitat collaged with pieces from the collection of the NGV.
Including
”They look straight through your soul”: The art of raising bats, Melissa Cunningham, The Sunday Age, 2023
World Book Night 2023 — We Remember
Leadbeater’s possum commission
Poems & Romances CD for Melbourne Chamber Orchestra, 2023
Melbourne Chamber Orchestra’s 2021 season
Have rocket, will travel
Reel to Real
Including
Q & A for RMIT University School of Art student Mya Cook, 2022
To those who require foraging resources and roosting sites.
To the ingenious ecological kindness of the pollinators and seed dispersers.
The echolocators catching insects on the wing. The leaf-consuming fuel-reducers.
The intricate connection of all things.
Rakali Grotto
Roosting on a concealed tree branch
Tiny but huge
Went out for a walk
Bats aren’t scary
Something reverberated
We were commissioned to create a Memory Game for Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery comprised of artworks from our three artists’ books Because I Like You (2016), Prattle, scoop, trembling: a flutter of Australian birds (2016), and A Flight of Twelve Southern Hemisphere Birds (2013).
There were once trees growing under the roads. There are still creeks flowing beneath the directional pathways we’ve imposed.
An artists’ book to take you within the forest, created especially for Biosphere.
Including
Biosphere — a sense of belonging catalogue essays by Felicity Spear and Penelope Gebhardt, 2021–2022
Inspired by the Collection, as part of World of the Book, Dome Galleries, State Library Victoria, 2024–2025
Empty the room. View it from the outside in. Brick by brick. Twig by twig. At the beginning: what is there?
An artists’ book featuring variations of the original Bowerbird collages we created especially for Genevieve Lacey’s Bower.
Including
Inspired by the Collection, as part of World of the Book, Dome Galleries, State Library Victoria, 2024–2025
Paper Universe: The book as art, Galleries, State Library of NSW, 2025–2026
Melbourne City of Literature Office: Hooded plover, Wildlife Postcards
Melbourne City of Literature Office: writers in residence, one-day, social media takeover
The Overwintering Project: With a slow and deliberate wing beat
Including
Q & A for RMIT University School of Art student Kasandra Hendy, 2022