Exhibition archive · 2026

After the Day of the Triffids

Bobby Graham & Carol Cooke · The Front, Lyneham, Canberra · 27 March–9 April 2026

Two artists listened independently to the same science-fiction story. What emerged were two very different visions of a world after the familiar order had changed.

Bobby Graham's blue and green abstract drawing, with branching black marks and vividly coloured washes — Bobby Graham · Work exhibited in *After the Day of the Triffids*

After the Day of the Triffids grew from a shared experience: Bobby Graham and Carol Cooke each listened to John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids as an audiobook. Rather than illustrating its plot, they responded to its atmosphere and its underlying tensions — mutation, resilience, adaptation and the uneasy relationship between people and altered environments.

Carol’s soft sculptures suggest botanical beings shaped by intervention and survival. Bobby’s layered drawings create their own speculative ecosystems of cells, tendrils, spirals and strange growth. Together, the works imagine not the catastrophe, but what comes afterwards.

01 / Drawn worlds

Bobby Graham

Ink, colour and interlocking forms suggest living systems — at once playful, intricate and faintly unsettling. The exhibition included drawings on paper as well as works developed digitally.

Pink and purple biomorphic drawing with branching flowers, roots and dense spiral patterns — Bobby Graham · Exhibited drawing

Blue and green drawing with black cellular networks, tendrils and three little fish — Bobby Graham · Exhibited drawing

Green and turquoise cellular drawing with handwritten words radiating from its edges — Bobby Graham · Exhibited drawing

02 / Invented botany

Carol Cooke

Carol’s stitched, assembled forms give the imagined plants bodies of their own. Fabric, pattern and unruly stems make these speculative organisms simultaneously comic, beautiful and a little alarming.

Five brightly coloured sewn sculptural plants in a row, each with different flowers and twisting stems — Carol Cooke · Sculptural works from the exhibition

Blue fabric flower sculpture with patterned patchwork base and bending stem — Carol Cooke · Detail of a textile sculpture

Pale cream hand-stitched botanical sculpture with delicate branching white forms — Carol Cooke · Textile sculpture

What takes hold afterwards

One story, two imaginations: ink and colour on one side, stitched fabric and sculptural invention on the other. The exhibition invited viewers to look closely at unfamiliar forms, and to consider how life might adapt in an altered world.