There is something rather pleasing about the idea that the festive season, with all its attendant expectations of good behaviour and good taste, might benefit from a little wildness. And who better to oblige than a magnetic woman with an untamed imagination? MECCA seems to have found its answer in Melbourne-based artist and author Tai Snaith, whom it has appointed as its 2026 Holiday Artist in partnership with the National Gallery of Victoria, with her unruly imagination bringing to life a curious cast of otherworldly butterflies and insects.

Working across painting, drawing and storytelling, the venerated artist creates surreal worlds in which people, plants and animals coexist. In this approach, her practice draws on the natural world, particularly weeds and wildflowers, alongside the forgotten women of art history, exploring themes of resilience and power through her use of colour, humour and playful irreverence. This alchemises beautifully in Party of the Parts, her original artwork for the collaboration, featuring an anthropomorphic cast of characters set to appear across the collectible gift boxes, bags and cards, limited edition MECCA COSMETICA and MECCA MAX sets, a legion of store windows across Australia and New Zealand, and, of course, digital platforms.

The process is an instinctive as the work might suggest. “I always draw a lot to begin with. For this work, I spent a lot of time looking at plants, taking photographs, and even pressing flowers and weeds I found on my daily walks along the Merri Creek. I read a lot about the resilience of weeds and started thinking about what we might learn from them in a coming apocalypse,” she recounts. Many of the characters painted are hybrid, either adopting a part-bug, part-woman, or part-flower, part-woman form. For Tai, they represent different parts of herself and the ways she aspires to metamorphose. The figures become a way of imaging a future in which, as Tai puts it, “as a species, we might evolve closer to nature rather than further away from it.”

A refusal to the obvious, Snaith’s idiosyncratic process involves staining “the linen and canvas first by pouring inks and watercolour pigments onto them. Once dry, I stretch the linen over frames, prime it and paint the figures in oil on top. I love this process because some of the figures, and definitely their positions, are informed by the bleeds and stains I see on the canvas, almost like a prompt from the universe.” In this approach, she relinquishes some control over the outcome, even painting with brushes taped to long sticks collected from her garden, lending the work a sense of unpredictability – like the creatures that populate the cast and the artist herself.

She continues: “I see a painting as a kind of puzzle or enjoyable problem to solve, similar to growing a garden, where you need to work out which plant will thrive in which spot. The staining process is like preparing the soil, and everything grows from there.”

Beyond the festive fanfare, the collaboration forms part of the ongoing partnership with the NGV and MECCA, established in 2016 to address gender inequality in the arts. Through its M-POWER initiative, MECCA supports the acquisition of works by Antipodean female artists for the NGV collection, helping secure their place in the country’s cultural record. For Snaith, the partnership extends beyond the campaign. Her work will join the NGV Collection, while a separate project, Wild Weed Tea, will feature in NGV Triennial 2026. A large-scale wall drawing created for the NGV Tea Room, the work pays homage to unruly women of art history, drawing parallels between their perseverance and the tenacity of weeds.

Given the particular interest of the artist, being apart of a commission that champions women and gender equality feels like a full-circle moment. Over 15 years ago, Snaith staged one of her first exhibitions which “involved painting portraits of an imaginary woman I created from art history and writing part of her biography. I knew the kind of multifaceted creative women I dreamed about must have existed earlier in history, but sadly, I simply couldn’t find any proof of them online at the time, so I made her up,” she reminisces.

To this day, the artist remains fascinated by women who were deemed difficult or resistant to categorisation finally getting their due, as we begin to redress the gender imbalance in art history. “So to be part of this incredible project, where MECCA is not only bringing my work to such a wide audience but also enabling it to enter the NGV Collection, really does feel like a positive change,” Snaith enthuses.

Saskia Neacsu