Artists

Rafaela Mori is a Brazilian-born visual artist based in Sydney whose practice explores themes of identity and belonging through the psychological and emotional dimensions of the migrant experience.

She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Arts and Design from Australian Catholic University, where she received multiple Faculty Commendations and the NAVA Ignition Award. Since graduating, Mori has been actively exhibiting and collaborating across collective and solo projects.

Her paintings inhabit a liminal space between memory and place, reflecting the internal negotiations of living across cultures. Through still life and botanical compositions that merge familiar and imagined elements, Mori examines how identity is continuously reshaped by migration, time, and environment. Her work embraces the “in-between” as a fertile ground for transformation and painting as a form of emotional mapping within contemporary expatriate and multiculturalism contexts.

In Residence at Bundanon

During my residency at Bundanon, I will extend my botanical painting practice through site-responsive and material exploration. Grounded in my experience as a Brazilian-born artist living in Australia, my work examines migration, hybridity, and belonging through real and imagined botanical forms. Engaging directly with the Shoalhaven landscape, I will observe, draw, and paint from life, while experimenting with surface, texture, and imprint as carriers of memory and place. By incorporating landscape rubbings and developing fictional botanicals informed by the site, I aim to collapse boundaries between observation and imagination, native and foreign, positioning the landscape as both subject and collaborator in an ongoing inquiry into identity from multiple perspectives.