I'm Michelle Blaesche-Lam — a mixed media artist living and working in Far North Queensland, where the rainforest meets the reef and nothing stays ordinary for long.

I have been making things since I was a child. Collecting shells on beaches before I knew what I would do with them. Carrying pieces of timber across thousands of kilometres because I knew they had a story to tell, even when I couldn't hear it yet.

For decades I have worked with virtually every artistic medium there is: stained glass, painting, pottery, beads, wire work, sewing - always looking for the thing that would let me build something dimensional, something alive, something you could move around and see from every angle.

Ten years ago, I lost my soulmate, my husband. I came to Cairns to learn how to live again, to become the person I was to become without him. What I found instead was a place that claimed my very soul. There is not a day I am here that I do not love being here - even when two metres of rain falls in twenty-four hours!

This is my place. The rainforest, the reef, the driftwood on the shores, the particular quality of light - this landscape didn't just become my home, it became my practice. It changed the direction of everything.

Five years ago I met Pete Blaesche, a Cairns local, who gave me the space and the steadiness to become fully myself. Next year I will carry his name alongside mine. Blaesche-Lam. The whole story in two words.

I am self-taught and obsessive in equal measure. I can create forever - the hard part is stopping. My work spans glasscapes built from reclaimed glass and ocean materials, sculptural works that carry the weight of memory and love, natural timber sculptures that reveal what was already waiting in the wood, and resin worlds that range from the wildlife of FNQ to gothic landscapes to fantasy realms where anything is possible.

I have never taken an art class. Not because I don't value learning — but because my learning happens in the making. My art has grown organically over decades of doing. Every piece teaches me something the one before it couldn't. That's where the work comes from. That's why it looks the way it does.

I also honour the child and the adolescent in me — the one who collected things, got lost in fantasy worlds, and found pure joy in making something just because it delighted her. That person never left. She just needed the right place to come home to.

I also run Garden Gifts and Glass — a living art and therapeutic terrarium practice here in Cairns.

Everything I make is one of a kind. Everything began as something found. What it became is entirely its own - and so, finally, am I.