My interest in lichens began through looking and collecting them. I grew up in the countryside, where they were familiar on rocks, trees and old surfaces, and I still collect them when I come across them. In Melbourne I see them much less often. I have always found their colours and textures beautiful, and I became increasingly curious about these small organisms that are so easy to pass by without noticing.

The more I read, the stranger they became. A lichen is not a single organism but a relationship between a fungus and a photosynthetic partner such as an alga or cyanobacterium. Some can establish themselves on bare rock and newly exposed surfaces, slowly helping to create conditions in which other forms of life can follow. Some lichens are also edible, which led me to wonder what kinds of life might remain if the ecosystems and food systems we know became severely depleted.

The stacked forms came from looking at lichens growing across volcanic rock. I coated the spheres in a rough, crumbly black plaster and worked Burel wool offcuts across them using a process of folding, binding and gathering the strips into dense patches. The uneven lengths, colours and edges of the wool were useful to me because the surface could grow irregularly rather than becoming too controlled.

Using offcuts was part of the work from the beginning. I did not want to disguise where the material had come from or turn it into something uniform. Its leftovers, irregularities and fragments became the material from which this new surface could grow.

I was fascinated by the fluorescence that some lichens reveal under ultraviolet light. I used fluorescent and UV sensitive pigments on the wool and across parts of the black surface so that much of the colour remains quiet in ordinary light and becomes much more intense under UV. The change is not even across the sculpture. Colour is strongest towards the top, then becomes more depleted as it travels down the stacked forms.

The lower part begins to lose its structure as well as its colour, appearing to soften and collapse into the dark base. I wanted that sense of decline to happen through the sculpture itself: through the colour fading, the surface darkening and the vertical body seeming to give way.

The small lights between the spheres interrupt the dark stack and make it feel as though illumination is held somewhere inside the object. In ordinary light the sculpture is rough, black and almost geological. Under ultraviolet light, a much more vivid and unfamiliar surface comes forward. I liked that both could exist within the same work, and that something initially easy to overlook could reveal another life when looked at differently.