Artworks
The Living Systems Project
The Living Systems Project is an ongoing body of contemporary mixed-media work by Lisi Pratini, a Brazilian-born Australian contemporary visual artist based in Northern NSW, Australia. Trees, roots, mycelial networks and archetypal forms connect nature with consciousness, memory, transformation and interconnection.
Investigation I — Trees of Life
Dragon Tree
2025
Watercolour, acrylic paint, acrylic paint pens and ink on paper
29.7 × 42 cm (A3)
Artist Collection
Dragon Tree marks the beginning of The Living Systems Project.
Created intuitively during an art therapy session, the work developed through layered movement, colour and thousands of individually painted dots.
Only later did the tree—and the dragons concealed within it—reveal themselves. Visible roots and mycelial networks connect the composition, presenting the tree as a living system rather than an isolated form.
The dragons appear as quiet guardians, suggesting that transformation, wisdom and meaning often emerge through patience and attentive observation.
Ancient Mother
2025
Watercolour, acrylic paint, acrylic paint pens and ink on paper
29.7 × 42 cm (A3)
Artist Collection
Ancient Mother is one of the foundational works within The Living Systems Project.
Its exposed roots and mycelial networks bring normally hidden structures into view, while a canopy of intuitively formed circles expands beyond the edge of the paper. The tree appears not as an isolated organism, but as a place of nurture, encounter and belonging.
For the artist, the work became both a universal symbol of care and the mother she needed for herself—a reminder that trees embody generosity, continuity and unconditional presence.
Luminous Tree
2025
Watercolour, acrylic paint, acrylic paint pens and ink on paper
29.7 × 42 cm (A3)
Artist Collection
Originally titled Night Tree, Luminous Tree explores illumination emerging from darkness.
Its radiant canopy appears suspended against a deep blue field, suggesting light generated from within rather than reflected from outside.
After completing it, the artist recognised that darkness was never the subject; it was the condition that allowed the tree’s inner radiance to become visible.
The work marks an important principle within The Living Systems Project: meaning often reveals itself slowly, sometimes long after the creative act is complete.
Born of the Horizon
2025
Watercolour, acrylic paint, acrylic paint pens and ink on paper
29.7 × 42 cm (A3)
Artist Collection
Born of the Horizon explores the symbolic meeting point between earth and sky.
Created intuitively, it became the first work in which the horizon emerged as an essential element of the artist’s visual language.
The tree carries a grounded masculine presence that Lisi later connected with her son, Arthur.
Rooted firmly while facing an open distance, the work reflects purpose, direction and the quiet strength required to move forward without losing connection to one’s origins.
The Witness Tree
2025
Watercolour, acrylic paint, acrylic paint pens and ink on paper
29.7 × 42 cm (A3) Artist Collection
The Witness Tree explores the possibility that nature possesses its own form of awareness.
Created intuitively through layers of colour, organic movement and repeated points, the work gradually revealed dozens of eyes within its canopy.
These forms were not planned; they emerged during the creative process, shifting the tree towards something simultaneously vegetal, bodily and sentient.
The work unsettles the boundary between observer and observed and asks a simple question: What if every living thing is already conscious?
She Who Blossoms
2025
Watercolour, acrylic paint, acrylic paint pens and ink on paper
29.7 × 42 cm (A3)
Artist Collection
She Who Blossoms explores feminine growth through the language of trees.
Created intuitively, the work later came to remind the artist of her daughter—not through physical resemblance, but through the quiet strength, grace and humility they both recognised within it.
Its organic forms suggest a living presence continually opening towards the world.
The work celebrates becoming as an ongoing process and proposes that every season of life carries the possibility of new growth, expression and blossoming.
Axis Mundi
2025
Watercolour, acrylic paint, acrylic paint pens and ink on paper
29.7 × 42 cm (A3)
Artist Collection
Axis Mundi draws upon the archetypal image of the World Tree as a bridge between earth and sky, body and consciousness.
Seven energy centres create a vertical rhythm along the trunk, while two ascending serpents evoke Kundalini and the dynamic relationship between feminine and masculine forces.
Their movement culminates at the crown, where apparent opposites meet. The work proposes transformation as a process of integration—an embodied possibility waiting to be felt, awakened and lived.
The Tree that Knows
2025
Watercolour, acrylic paint, acrylic paint pens and ink on paper
29.7 × 42 cm (A3)
Artist Collection
The Tree that Knows was inspired by a tree growing beside the Guaíba Lake in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
Developed from a photograph taken by the artist, the work moves beyond landscape to become a reflection on maturity, quiet strength and the beauty of fully inhabiting one’s own life.
Lisi later recognised within the tree the presence of her stepfather, whose kindness, humility and steadiness shaped her understanding of wisdom.
The work suggests that true knowledge is lived, embodied and expressed through presence.
Highest Priestess
2025
Watercolour, acrylic paint, acrylic paint pens and ink on paper
29.7 × 42 cm (A3)
Artist Collection
Created during an art therapy process exploring the question of legacy, Highest Priestess gradually transformed from a symbolic tree into an archetypal feminine presence.
Its orientation was discovered only when the work was turned, allowing a dragon and an emerging figure to become visible.
The painting reflects the lifelong process of becoming: recovering hidden gifts, trusting intuition and allowing one’s deepest nature to take form. It presents purpose not as becoming someone else, but as revealing what has always existed within.
Ripening
2025
Watercolour, acrylic paint, acrylic paint pens and ink on paper
29.7 × 42 cm (A3)
Artist Collection
Ripening reflects a period of inner transition and contemplation on maturity.
Spiralling forms, created through what the artist describes as “the dance of my hands,” evoke fruit, seeds, galaxies and entire worlds—the future already held within the fruit.
The tree receives nourishment from the darkness of the earth and light from the sun, transforming both into life.
The work explores the harmony between giving and receiving, proposing that experience can ripen into wisdom that overflows towards others.
Offspring
2025
Watercolour, acrylic paint, acrylic paint pens and ink on paper
29.7 × 42 cm (A3)
Artist Collection
Offspring takes the female reproductive system as its point of departure.
At the lower centre, the ovaries connect the composition to the red energy of the root chakra, while flowering forms suggest children—understood not personally, but universally.
The ovaries become worlds and the reproductive body becomes cosmic. At the centre, a tree introduces structure and balance within the creative field.
The work explores sexual, vital and creative energy as expressions of the same life force: creation before explanation.
The Living Network
2025
Watercolour, acrylic paint, acrylic paint pens and ink on paper
29.7 × 42 cm (A3)
Artist Collection
The Living Network brings tree, nervous system and mycelium into a single central structure.
Blue and violet forms evoke cells, mandalas and portals, while fluid roots suggest currents of information moving across different layers of life.
The work explores the unseen systems of communication that connect organisms, bodies and environments.
What appears separate on the surface may belong to a larger planetary network—an intelligent field of exchange extending through earth, body and consciousness.
Lisi Pratini | Contemporary Visual Artist 