Busy Head is celebrating 10 years. How did it all begin, and where did the name come from?
Busy Head started 10 years ago. I’d always had creative side hustles, from embroidery to sewing. When I started making fun earrings featuring drawings of hanging plant baskets, fish and other things. I made them initially just for myself and as gifts for friends. Then people started asking if they could buy them.
I decided that if I was going to do it as a side hustle, I wanted to set it up more meaningfully and consciously. I wanted to create products I was really happy with. It just grew from there.
I’ve always talked about my mind going 100 miles an hour and being a “busy head”. I’ve said that since I was a kid. A nice way I slow myself down and ground myself is through art, so when I started the art practice Busy Head, it seemed apt to name it after my head.
What first inspired you to start illustrating?
I’ve always been into drawing ever since I was a kid. It was always something I did for fun. When I was studying classical archaeology at university, we interacted with artefacts by holding them and drawing them. That was really the catalyst for what is now my illustrative style.
I like capturing a thing as it is but making it a bit more fun and vibrant through brighter, bolder colours.
Birds and Brisbane feature heavily in your work. What is it about them that you love?
I love Brisbane, and I love birds. I spend a lot of time in nature, so birds and animals naturally became a big part of my work.
I feel like you can capture the essence of a place by looking at its plants and animals. For me, it’s a celebration of a city and a place. I do a lot of birding around Brisbane, visiting different ecosystems and seeing as many birds as I can. I love going to the Wynnum and Lytton wetland areas, and I also love going to Mount Coot-tha and Mount Glorious.
I take photos of the birds I see and the flowers I come across that I find interesting. I use those photographs to create pencil sketches first, then digitise them and finish them as digital illustrations.
Your work has a strong sense of nostalgia. Where does that come from?
One piece of feedback I get consistently is that my work feels nostalgic. It makes people feel lovely emotions associated with memory, connection and slower-paced living.
Both my grandmas collected tea towels. Everywhere they went, they would buy a little token of the area, and I always loved that they featured flowers and birds because those are the things that have always captured my curiosity and imagination.
I lost them both in the last few years, but I was lucky enough to receive most of their tea towel collections. I’ve been using some of the damaged tea towels to patchwork fabrics together and make garments that feel really nostalgic and sentimental to me.
I also tie in my own artwork with the tea towels. I think they’re an underrated little thing. They’re obviously functional, but they’re also a lovely expression of art that you can have incidentally in your home.
I feel like that’s just the nicest compliment I could get. I’m all for art being challenging and provoking important conversations, but I still think there’s a really important place for illustration that people can connect with and that makes them feel good.
Tell us about the tea towel dress you’re wearing.
This one features the Flowers of Brisbane tea towel. I chose a range of flowers that are endemic to Brisbane and its surrounds, including Brisbane wattle and coastal banksia.
I chose flowers from different environments in and around Brisbane and arranged them as a little celebration of the city’s unique flowers.
What’s next for Busy Head?
I’m working on my 2027 calendar right now. I do a calendar every year that’s about birds in some way or another. I’m working on all the illustrations and putting together a nice new collection, so people can spend a year thinking about birds.
Shop Busy Head at MoB Shop
Images: Museum of Brisbane