Post grad students, Yennifer (Yen) Longo and Berenice Della Porta, have embraced art while studying at La Trobe University. While both have had this passion for a long time, they now sell some of their pieces at the Sanctuary gift shop.
While studying wildlife conservation, Yen noticed that there wasn’t enough art relating to insects and botanical organisms. She saw this as a gap in the market and started making stickers.
“I guess it’s kind of trendy. People were asking specifically for like stickers,” she says. “You should sell this so you can make this into a sticker. I want this on my phone, I want this on my laptop.”
“I sold some art to the sanctuary years ago when I was first starting to do my stickers and I was hand cutting them. Then I had a year or so off to really focus on my technique.”
Yen also does photography prints, where she uses a microscope to take photos, stacking them to make them look extremely clear.
“I was doing a degree in conservation biology, and we learned a lot about plants,” she says. “Seeing it on a diagram is cool, I can understand what that is, but I want to see it on a plant.”
“I started taking my own photos and realised things look really pretty and started editing them more and then decided to enter them into photography competitions and they did pretty well.”
On the other hand, Berenice grew up in a family of artists and didn’t have much of a background in nature. However, after coming to Australia to study, she fell in love with the gum trees which inspired her to create wood burning art.
“I literally discovered it as a technique to portray [and] to paint eucalyptus pieces,” she says. “The flora and fauna in Australia has evolved with fire to a great extent, so I’m trying to use these beautiful trees.”
While these pieces are now sold by the sanctuary, their art stall at the university is what first caught the attention of sanctuary staff members.
“[The Sanctuary team] noticed it and we talked a little bit about it when the store was just coming into fruition,” Yennifer says.
“We started that stall a couple of years ago to show that art and science go hand in hand,” Berenice says. “In the scientific community, there are lots of artists and creative people and musicians [and] it’s incredible the amount of people who combined both things just in this university.”
“People used to think as scientists as this old white man in a lab coat. Over recent years, a lot of people… started being green advocates about the presence of science… And this was a contribution to say, hey, actually scientists are creative people, don’t box us into very rational, very methodical, very socially awkward.”
While it can be challenging to balance art and study, Yen and Berenice agree that it’s important not to push or pressure yourself to create art.
“If you’re going to be doing art or you’re going to be doing something creative, you really need to be doing it for yourself,” Yen says.
“Just do what you feel [and] do it for yourself and also try to surround yourself with likeminded people [because] community helps,” Berenice says.
You can find Yennifer and Berenice’s pieces in the sanctuary gift shop (open 10am-3pm, 7days through Spring). Come down and see what catches your eye.
“I hope you get excited about this too because I want to talk to you about this forever,” Yen says.
The Sanctuary is keen to source more products from the La Trobe community, so you are a student, staff member or alumni and produce art ot other giftware, please get in touch - wildlife@latrobe.edu.au
