Phoebe Paradise's Queenslander obsession started with her nan's house.
The Meanjin/Brisbane-based artist, illustrator and designer spent much of her childhood frolicking in the backyard of the big, beautiful intergenerational Paddington home (back when Paddington was less multimillion-dollar homes and more slightly "dodgy").
The area was all big fig trees and dense subtropical vibes, despite being an inner-city suburb.
As glorious as it was, it wasn't to last.
"We were there during the 90s flood, when my Nan lived downstairs and my parents, brother and I lived upstairs. Everything she owned was lost. All of her photos, everything," Paradise tells ABC Arts.
The echoes of that event overshadowed Paradise's childhood, even though she was too young to remember it happening. It was a big part of the reason they left the house years later.
What followed was a series of almost yearly moves from one flat to another — and a young Paradise found herself yearning to return to the embrace of the Queenslander.
By the end of high school, Meanjin had started to feel stifling — as home towns tend to by the time you reach your teenage years
"As soon as I finished school I was like, 'I've gotta get out of here, Brisbane's got nothing for me, it's too damn hot, I've gotta get to Melbourne,'" Paradise recalls.
But distance, as the adage goes, made her heart grow fonder.
"Brisbane has this incredible relationship with itself where there's this sort of rusted on cultural cringe. But when I moved back in 2011, I realised there was so much of this city I'd taken for granted and I wanted other people to see it," she says.
There was also a big part of her that bristled at Alain de Botton's assessment of Brisbane as one of the "world's ugly cities" in 2014.
"He said something like, 'No one on the planet responds deeply to the brutal cross city expressway and chunky stained brown office blocks of the city,'" Paradise says.
"But what if we did? What if there's something beautiful and meaningful in this city that's been called ugly forever?
"Even the blooms of black mould that sit underneath an air-conditioning unit on the outside of an apartment building, or the waterline on an old house that survived the floods, deserve to be seen before they're inevitably plastered away.
"It feels important to explore what the visual identity of this swamp city built on mangroves is — what it looks like, what it wants to look like and what it wishes it didn't look like."
Paradise started small, working with biro and loose sheets of paper to immortalise the image of the dilapidated West End share house
In the mid-2010s she made a series of lo-fi, xeroxed flyers to advertise gigs put on by local bands. Today, they serve as a reminder that punks like Paradise, who had low-paying casual jobs, "could afford to live in a share house with an enormous backyard and put on gigs under the floorboards of massive houses in West End" a decade ago.
"We had beautiful kitchens in these gorgeous big homes, and that was Brisbane's selling point," says Paradise.
"You know, we might not be Melbourne, but at least we had all of this space, all of this opportunity, all this lush subtropical landscape at our fingertips. And we could afford to live really well with little.
"A lot of those properties have been subdivided in some way now. Lots of them are being turned into Frankenstein granny flats… what used to be has been renovated out of existence in a lot of areas."
The Queenslander motif became central to Paradise's work from there, cropping up time and again in her illustrations, painstakingly photocopied zines, short films, sculptural works and concert posters and murals for increasingly renowned bands and festivals.
With each piece, her take on Queenslanders and their relationship to natural environment and housing instability became more surreal
In her earlier works, Paradise's Queenslanders were frequently depicted as standalone buildings, towering lazily over postcard-perfect landscapes, in conversation with but not necessarily affected by the nature surrounding them.
Real darkness — in stark contrast to her earlier penchant for sweet, fantastical designs (albeit with a grungy edge) — began creeping into her illustrations in about 2020 amid the burgeoning housing and cost of living crises and another wave of destabilising floods in 2021-2022.
Suddenly, Paradise started elongating the houses' stilts, hoisting her imagined Queenslanders up to wild, disproportionate heights as she began exploring what life here might look like in future, her work entering a speculative science fiction world in the process.
The space between the houses she fashioned decreased, at times resembling shanty towns perilously stacked atop each other. Ficus trees started living up to their "strangling fi" namesake, pushing their way up through the floorboards of unsuspecting houses in an act of nature reclaiming the space that once belonged to it.
And the suggestion that something monstrous is always lurking below our Queenslanders became increasingly pronounced: sometimes in a more real sense, in the form of opaque stagnant water pooled underneath; other times with the outline of claws at the end of those vital stilts, capable of moving the houses of those with enough money to do so away from rising waters.
"Flooding has become a recurring theme in my work because it's a recurring theme of the place where I live. Everyone I know was affected by the floods, in one way or another. The waterline from the 2021-2022 flood is still visible on many of the houses in my area," Paradise explains.
"We've got this so-called once-in-a-lifetime event that keeps happening within our one lifetime."
In the time since ABC Arts spoke to Paradise, there have been two more severe weather events in south-east Queensland alone.
"But [flooding is also a recurring theme in my work] because the fortification against our climate in the design of our houses is something that fascinates me. As does the fact that people in Brisbane have this interesting sense of pride in it, but also wariness of it as well," she says.
"And then there's the housing crisis, which has affected who gets to experience living in the beautiful Queenslander at all, as well as who gets to stay in an elevated one above the waterline. That consumes me too because it looms large here.
"You're only able to stay above the waterline in a Queenslander if you own and can afford to put your house up on stilts, can afford one that's already been lifted, or have the money to live away from a flood plain."
Enter: Foundation
It wasn't long after Paradise's focus shifted towards tackling the harsh realities and potential future of life in Brisbane (alongside the sweet, fantastical side of it) that the city started paying attention.
In May last year, the Museum of Brisbane gave Paradise her biggest platform yet.
As part of the annual Botanica: Contemporary Art Outside exhibition in the Botanic Gardens, Paradise created a series of towering, laser-cut aluminium houses resting atop the precariously tall stilts that have become one of her signatures, as a gothic tribute to the airy Queenslanders we all know, love, and are simultaneously fatigued by.
Unsettlingly still floodwater laid claim to the land below, suggesting a balmy future plagued by cane toads in which extreme weather events have become part of everyday existence. In this eerie reality, communication lines tethered the homes to each other.
And yet, the houses' aesthetic beauty was still undeniable. And the water below provided a sense of tranquillity, despite the unanswered questions it posed. Warm and inviting light emanated from inside, depicting our ability to adapt in the face of a changing climate.
Paradise called the work Foundation.
It will be re-exhibited at the Hervey Bay Regional Gallery from September.
"We're thinking of it as a reiteration, so we'll be showing it in a different way to how it was shown in Brisbane," Sarah Thomson, the gallery's acting director, says.
"Foundation does an amazing job of coalescing a visual identity for Queensland by using this really iconic Queensland architecture that should be celebrated, but also showing how it's come about through our strange relationship with our landscape and our need to constantly adapt and change our spaces in order to survive."
Thomson points out their region is also no stranger to extensive flooding, but being coastal they also have to consider things like erosion on top of the impacts of extreme weather events on the landscape and wildlife.
"It's quite a familiar, raw, real and traumatic experience for a lot of people here."
It's heavy stuff, but Thomson thinks the playful manner with which Paradise approached Foundation is disarming.
"It helps people see the idiosyncrasies to this slightly absurd way that we live, and our relationship to the landscape."
Paradise adds that a lot of people tell her Foundation has a Howl's Moving Castle vibe to it.
"Which I love," she says.
"Because that's what a lot of my work is about — trying to put Brisbane in the context of a world of my imagining."
Phoebe Paradise: 'Burbs to the Bay is at the Hervey Bay Regional Gallery from September 21 to November 17, 2024.