Josephine Chime’s ‘Within Nature’ series of illustrations is bright, beautiful, playful and celebratory.

The works merge human and non-human/vegetable, skewing colonial/consumerist beauty norms, celebrating physical diversity and showing the subject as continuous and intertwined with living biodiversity. The patterns and symbols suggest rituals, languages and ways of communicating beyond the written word. As Josephine explains,

“Full Glory highlights the marks imprinted on the body with its indents of lines, scars, bumps and textures which speak of a story through patterns. Mirroring the bark of a tree that grows more abundant with physical stories etched onto its surface. The voluminous shape and wild botanical hair of the female depicted seeks to show the unequivocal power of freely allowing nature to sculpt the body, hyper realising biological patterns of the skin to counter the warping of nature’s individuality.”