SYDNEY.- I think of Eucalyptus trees as fierce sculptors who work with wood. I want people to admire their diversity, their shapes, colours, textures, and bio-geometries. I hope that you too can see the fierce beauty of life that is contained in these wondrous forms. – Maria Fernanda Cardoso

One of Latin America’s most celebrated artists, based in Sydney since 1997, Colombian Australian Maria Fernanda Cardoso, began a presentation of her latest series of sculptural forms inspired by and crafted from nature, which opened at Sullivan+Strumpf Sydney Thursday June 8, 2023. An expansion on her acclaimed 2021 Gumnuts series, this latest body of work celebrates the beauty and astonishing complexity of native Eucalyptus woody gumnuts: wondrous, tough, expressive forms, with which she feels a close affinity, encapsulated in the exhibition title, Fierce Maternity.

“When I was giving birth to my first child, I had to have an emergency caesarean. The anaesthetic wasn’t working properly, and they had to cut me open to save my child. I felt everything. I knew then that I would do anything to protect my children,” Cardoso says.

“I see in Eucalyptus woody gumnuts that same incredibly fierce maternal drive to protect their seed. They use every ounce of their energy to do so. Just as humans do.

“The mother gumnut grows wood around her seeds and waits - sometimes for years, for the right moment to release them into the world. Protecting them from pests, the heat of the sun, throughout extreme fires, floods, and droughts.

“Sometimes these gumnuts have waited so long so long to release their seed that they have turned grey from sun exposure, or green with moss. They are protective and creative. Just like humans. Just like me,” she concludes.

Maria Fernanda Cardoso’s art blends nature, art, science, and technology, transforming unconventional materials into awe-inspiring installations, sculptures, performances, and videos. Her work invites audiences to observe the wonders of nature, and particularly of the small. Throughout her four-decade career, she has employed a variety of often unconventional means to explore our complex world environment. For example, using high-powered microscopes to photograph the sex organs of plants and invertebrates and plants; shearing and dying sheepskins to create murals; arranging preserved frogs into abstract patterns; filming the mating rituals of Australian peacock spiders; or using emu feathers to create avant-garde capes and hats.

Her distinctive work is held by many of the world’s foremost contemporary art museums.

In Fierce Maternity Cardoso celebrates the highly adaptive and resilient nature of the Australian Eucalyptus and its woody gumnuts – showcasing a broad selection of their diverse forms, each unique to the 700+ species of Eucalyptus tree, and the local environment within which it must survive. Whilst the leaves of the Eucalyptus tree all look the same or very similar, Cardoso points out, each has a different shape of gumnut. Some are minuscule – those found on Australia’s east coast, whilst in Western Australia they are gigantic.

The centrepiece of the exhibition is an extraordinary six-meter-long installation consisting of over 50 meticulously constructed gumnut spheres, made using a wide variety of native species. The work not only highlights the beauty and diversity of Australian eucalypts but is a culmination of years of research that began in the Ngaanyatjarra Lands in Western Australia during an artist residency undertaken in 2008. Within these sculptures, Cardoso once again encapsulates a wondrous metaphor for life.

On the surrounding walls, a series of intricate wall drawings echo and elevate the natural patterns Cardoso has observed in nature. Each intricate work composed of the tough, wooden capsules carefully attached to a white substrate.




Maria Fernanda Cardoso

Sydney-based artist Maria Fernanda Cardoso (born 1963, Bogotá, Colombia) blends nature, art, science, and technology to transform unconventional materials into awe-inspiring installations, sculptures, performances and videos. Her beautiful work invites us to experience the wonders of nature.

She is a recipient of the prestigious Creative Australia Fellowship from the Australia Council for the Arts, has exhibited at New York MoMA, the Centre Pompidou, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, PS1, Fundacion La Caixa in Barcelona, the DAROS Foundation in Zurich, and the Centro Reina Sofia in Madrid.

While never limited by materials or methods, her curiosity about worlds-within-worlds permeates everything she does. In the early 1980s, following in the footsteps of her accomplished architect parents, Cardoso studied architecture and visual arts at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. In 1987, she moved to the USA where she graduated with a Masters’ degree in sculpture at Yale University, having been awarded a full scholarship.

One of her most fabled projects is The Cardoso Flea Circus (1994-2000), a performance piece featuring real live fleas. Over the course of a six-year period, Cardoso trained fleas to perform surprising feats such as walking on tightropes, pulling chariots, jumping through hoops, and dancing tango.

The Circus toured internationally at venues including the Sydney Opera House, the Centre Pompidou, the Arts Festival Atlanta, the Fabric Workshop and Museum (Philadelphia), and the San Francisco Exploratorium. This work, including a series of videos made in collaboration with Ross Rudesch Harley, is now part of Tate Modern’s permanent collection.

In 2000, the Museum of Modern Art in New York commissioned her to create a major new installation featuring 36,000 plastic lilies along a 125-foot-long wall. The permanent beauty of the plastic flowers, which imitated the architecture of old cemeteries in Colombia, expressed a mourning for lives lost during the rampant violence suffered in her country of birth.

In 2003, she represented Colombia at the Venice Biennale, exhibiting a large installation of starfish woven together into a submarine landscape called Woven Water. In that same year had a major solo show, Zoomorphia, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.

Throughout her career, Cardoso has continued to explore nature and its links to culture and science. In 2012 she completed her PhD at the University of Sydney’s College of the Arts. Her research on the aesthetics of reproductive morphology— likely to be one of the more unusual studies to be presented in the hallowed halls of academia—culminated in the Museum of Copulatory Organs (MoCO).

At MoCo, exhibited at Cockatoo Island as part of the 18th Biennale of Sydney, visitors encountered animal genitalia and sexual selection through three-dimensional models in glass, bronze and 3D printing, videos, drawings and electron- microscopy scans, all displayed in museum cases.

Over the years she has worked on different public art projects, using large-scale to emphasise the wonders of nature, particularly of the small. In 2022 she completed Ripples and Droplets (2022), a 335 square metres mural inspired by the natural movement of water. Integrated into Castle Residencies mixed development, the mural stands 11 stories high and is believed to be the largest public artwork by an Australian artist in the Sydney CBD.

Cardoso has lived and worked in Sydney since 1997.