Hoo Gallery

Eco-print art in Richmond and Mount Eliza

Hoo Gallery operates from two locations: Richmond and Mount Eliza on Melbourne's Mornington Peninsula. Artist Dharshi de Silva started the gallery to showcase botanical artwork made through eco-printing, a technique that transfers living plants directly onto canvas. Over fifteen years, Dharshi has cultivated a garden with more than 1,000 plants and 30 carefully selected trees, each chosen for the textures and impressions it can produce. The gallery's focus on patience, sustainable materials, and living plants makes it a distinctive space for collectors seeking nature-based contemporary art.

The appointment format means each visit works around you, and you can take proper time with individual pieces. Both Richmond (VIC 3121) and Mount Eliza offer the same philosophy where environmental care and fine art sit side by side.

How eco-printing works: botanical impressions as contemporary art

She grows her own plants, presses them straight onto natural fibre canvas and paper, then works them up with earth pigments and natural dyes. What you get are paintings of ivy, dahlias, and plenty of other plants from the garden, each one completely different and impossible to recreate. It's basically a direct snapshot of nature, trapped in colour and form.

Her work sits at the crossroads of Eastern and Western painting. There's the softness and balance you find in Japanese screen prints mixed with the strong colours and clean lines of Toulouse-Lautrec. These aren't just flower studies, though. They work more like modern vanitas paintings, making you think about beauty, decay, and the cycles of life and regeneration. A lot of the pieces have "All is Well" painted across them, so when you look at them you're meant to find something hopeful and calm.

Dharshi de Silva and the future of eco-printing

Dharshi de Silva has made her mark as an eco-printer, working across oil, watercolour, botanical painting, and earth pigments before bringing that range into eco-printing as a serious contemporary art form. She didn't stumble into this work. Years of artistic practice led her to deliberately blend gardening, printmaking, and painting, and that deliberate approach has opened up new directions in the field. Her eco-prints sit comfortably on gallery walls alongside other contemporary work because she treats the method with the same rigour and intentionality that painters have always brought to canvas.

Her pieces come out of a desire to give people something genuine: moments of beauty and a connection to the natural world and what it offers. She keeps the work open to interpretation, letting viewers find vanitas themes if they look for them, seeing reflections on death, renewal, and how we hunt for meaning in what we see. Every piece she makes reflects her commitment to sustainable practice. No two are identical. Each canvas bears the marks of actual plants, their prints and textures captured in the work. The whole process respects both the art and the natural world it comes from.

Visiting the gallery: how apartment shows work

Hoo Gallery, Richmond VIC 3121, runs appointments in private apartment spaces in Richmond and Mount Eliza. The idea is straightforward: fewer people in the room at once, proper time to sit with the work. You book online and they work around your schedule. It's not about rushing through or ticking boxes. The work is eco-print paintings, the kind that actually benefits from a quiet look and a decent conversation about what's going on in them.

They're happy to chat about Dharshi's practice and answer questions. Everyone's welcome to book an appointment, whatever your experience with contemporary botanical art or eco-printing might be. The appointment is set up so you can actually engage with what you're looking at.

Sustainable practice and serious art

The work at Hoo Gallery marries artistic skill with environmental responsibility and honest craftsmanship. Dharshi's approach to sustainability runs deep, not just on the surface. Every piece uses natural materials, plants grown in gardens, and earth pigments, with no two works identical. She lets the genuine variation of living plants shape what appears on the canvas rather than making copies. It's a deliberate move away from mass production towards pieces that can't be repeated. The whole space makes clear that fine art and looking after the environment aren't at odds with each other.

Hoo Gallery (Richmond, VIC 3121) trades in art that actually grapples with how we think about nature, sustainability, and the labour that goes into real art. With locations in Richmond and Mount Eliza, the gallery focuses on contemporary botanical work that's about more than pretty decoration. These pieces make you sit with ideas around beauty, impermanence, and our relationship to the natural world.