Johanna Flath was born and raised in Bermuda and, like many Bermudians, yearned for adventures afar.

Art proved a gateway, forging a path for a career in the US.

Having been artist-in-residence at The Children’s Museum of Maine, Ms Flath now teaches high school art in the New England state but with family and friends here, Bermuda is a constant draw.

Three of her paintings are now on display in the 2024 Bermuda Biennial, Places, Presence & Poetics: An Unpacking.

It’s a journey that started when she was a young child.

“I was always interested in art. I loved to paint and draw and I had some really wonderful art teachers in high school here in Bermuda – Amy Evans and Lisa Quinn Brown were real inspirations to me,” she said.

When the time came for university she studied painting at Rhode Island School of Design.

“It's definitely been kind of a life path of wanting to be a painter and a creator,” Ms Flath said.

“I primarily work in water-based paints. I do oil paint sometimes but I just like the fluidity, that kind of nature of what watercolours can do.”

Although she had always wanted to submit work for the Bermuda National Gallery’s Biennial the timing before had never been right.

“I showed several times earlier, in my twenties and thirties, at Masterworks and the Bermuda Society of Arts, but I just hadn't ever hit upon something that I was really excited about, that I wanted to show for the Biennial. This series was something that I've been working on for the last two years,” she said.

“I was definitely using the creative process to kind of work through my own life experiences. I was trying to heal from some things that were going on and so these paintings, I just dove right into them, and I found them [to be] a place of healing and peace.”

Gloaming, Virgo and Vesper are her three pieces on display. Each was created using watercolour and pastel on paper.

The artist used plants to make “a kind of fossilised imprint” on the paper which she then drew on to highlight their colour and form.

Her idea was an exploration of the “ephemeral and transitory nature of life”.

“I started working in this manner about two years ago. [Before then] I’d been doing still lifes and landscape paintings and other kinds of images,” she said.

“It was very freeing to just be able to work with the plants directly and use their structure and imagery by printing them and not have to create my own drawings of something. It gave me a lot of time to think about larger ideas ― of life and death.”

Although she did not initially intend to show the pieces, as she was creating them it struck her that they were “actually really interesting”.

“It takes about a day for the whole kind of printing process to happen. And then I draw into the paintings after they're dry and that could be, you know, from several hours to several days depending on how I'm enjoying them.”

She was then “very honoured” to learn that jurors Ebony Patterson and Helen Toomer thought that her paintings, all of which feature “ferns and grasses; simple humble plants”, should be included.

“I was, personally, really excited about the way that these paintings looked and so it was great that the jurors also had a similar response,” Ms Flath said.

“I would just take walks in the fields [and pick up what I found]. I've made at least 40 images now in this process and that's what's sort of fun. I feel like it can never end somehow, this experimentation.”

Having not exhibited her art for “the last several years” Ms Flath is excited to once again show her work and is pleased by the feedback.

“It’s been very positive. I've had lots of people come up and ask me how the process works and how I made the images, and I've had a few people then approach me to do some commissions for them.

“I keep thinking it'd be really fun to go and work in people's gardens here and use plants that are directly from their spaces and personalise an image like that.”

Like most artists, finding the time to create her own work is “a perennial issue”.

“If you're an artist, usually you have some other kind of line of work. Being a teacher is great in that I get to be a lifelong learner, and I definitely am inspired by things that my students do; I’m constantly surprised and humbled by things that younger people come up with,” she said.

“I'd love to be able to have more time for my own work. Part of my own life journey is that I've had children in the last decade but now they're getting older, so that’s definitely freed up more time for myself.”

The next exhibit Ms Flath’s work appears in could be a solo one featuring her entire botanical print series.

“I have between 30 and 40 pieces that I feel really satisfied with, and so that would be kind of the next step for me,” she said.

• Thirty-two works by 25 artists are on display as part of the 2024 Bermuda Biennial at the Bermuda National Gallery until January. For more information, visitbng.bm/exhibition/2024bermudabiennial/