Touching other people’s butterflies is a digital video narrative which animates a colonial painting by the convict artist Joseph Lycett. Joan Ross peoples Lycett’s Distant View of Hobart (1825) with figures painted by the eighteenth-century English artist Gainsborough. They represent the English colonisers of an Australian landscape. The narrative begins with a retouched version of Lycett’s view of Hobart, in which the settlement and foreground figures have been removed. In this pristine landscape, a large, colourful butterfly emerges from a cocoon. Invading this scene is a well-dressed colonial woman with her fluorescent yellow dog, who proceeds to spray the butterfly with fluorescent yellow spray paint. She is then joined by a colonial gentleman who catches the butterfly in a net, perhaps to add to the kind of botanical collection that imposed a scientific order and method on an unfamiliar land. Order is reinstated when the cocoon grows to engulf the colonial couple and the butterfly flies free in the original unpeopled landscape.

Ross’s digital video animation combines colonial painting’s recording and claiming of territory with the contemporary territorial claims on the urban landscape made through spray cans – whether by graffiti artists tagging their names or council workers marking work sites. Her handmade and collaged effects bring the colonial and the contemporary into alignment as they address themes of the possession and dispossession of land and the staking of ownership. The neat loop of metamorphosis that Ross enacts in this video narrative suggests that nature trumps culture, and that change – despite civilisation’s machinations – is inevitable.