For NATURAL HISTORY, Burns and Young have created an immersive installation artwork that utilizes photographs of local flora and selected artworks from the permanent collection in response to history and the environment. The artwork is a triptych composed of asynchronous repeat patterns printed onto fabric wall coverings incorporating photographs of plants, fruits, and flowers the artists made during an early 2020 research trip to Melbourne. Photographs from Cranbourne Gardens, the Royal Botanic Gardens, and the Collingwood Children’s Farm and surrounding neighborhood are combined with botanical drawings from Australia's early explorers and settlers to create the installation. The Selected NGV collection works portray issues of colonialism, the natural world, and narrative depictions of religion and the supernatural and are installed against these wallcoverings — reorganizing them to form contemporary points of view about issues of race, class, and gender. “As artists, we are interested in how people, plants, and animals are represented in various natural settings, landscapes, and gardens. By drawing from the permanent collection, the immersive artwork also becomes a story about the formation of Australia itself, and how people and plants from other places have naturalized within the indigenous landscape.” NATURAL HISTORY draws into focus the complex and dynamic relationship between historical and contemporary ideals of beauty and nature, religious ideology, and narrative themes of colonialism and how they function as storytelling in Western art.

“Natural History” ran from December 19, 2020 to April 18, 2021 as part of the NGV Triennial 2020 at NGV International, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
Created by David Allen Burns & Austin Young of the art collective Fallen Fruit, the work draws from historical botanical imagery and the NGV’s encyclopedic holdings to create an immersive visual environment that catalyzes new ways of seeing canonical artworks and the natural world—questioning assumptions about nature, colonial classification systems, and cultural narratives embedded in museum histories.