Touching other people’s butterflies appropriates convict artist Joseph Lycett's Distant View of Hobart (1825) with figures painted by eighteenth-century English artist John Gainsborough to represent English colonisers of the Australian landscape. The retouched version of Lycett’s pristine landscape is invaded by a well-dressed colonial woman with her fluorescent yellow dog, spray painting a native butterfly with fluorescent yellow spray paint.

Ross’s works combine 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.