The ideas and themes that underpin Michelle Cawthorn’s practice stem from a sustained engagement with memory, its indexical relationship between past and present, and the ways that drawing can aid memory retrieval.

But memory can be elusive, like a bird.

In a manner akin to the Surrealist drawing game of Exquisite Corpse, 'Brown Treecreeper' pairs a digital render of a dissected bird head by the unnamed colonial era artist The Sydney Bird Painter, with the artist’s hatched mark-making in pen and ink. The work explores the elusory nature of memory by playfully reimagining how a brown treecreeper might look if constructed solely from fleeting glimpses.