Moments
- Libby Wakefield
- 16 Sep—4 Oct 2026
At first glance, the work of Gundungurra-based Libby Wakefield appears like imaginatively constructed landscapes: gauzy trees and milky waterways, skies of rose and blue, and landforms softly implied on the horizon line, veiled by fog. But, when viewing her source — the Wingecarribee River, its tree-lined banks, and the ancient peat swamp at Kangaloon — her paintings reveal themselves to be strikingly true depictions of exactly what she sees.
It’s on a canoe, drifting leisurely down the narrow Wingecarribee in the early morning, or on foot, that Wakefield takes her inspiration, ‘locking’ what she sees in the mind before returning to her Southern Highlands studio and setting it to canvas. “These experiences foster an intimate connection with the landscape,” the artist says, “allowing its rhythms, atmosphere, and subtle transformations to reveal themselves over time.”
While Wakefield does specifically avoid objective documentation, it’s her eye and skill as a painter that have her doing something equally challenging: an evocation of the mood and feeling of a place, which can, in the slipperiness of memory, feel even more accurate — and photographic — than a realist depiction.
It is precisely by returning to the same places, over and again, and these repeated encounters, that the artist develops her enduring visual language, the grammar of which bends and changes with the seasons.
The work of the English Romantics is vividly felt in the pieces that form Moments, her follow-up collection to her celebrated 2025 debut, Capture. Romantic painters like J.M.W. Turner specifically sought to capture sublime moments in nature — that is, a communion with the awe and grandeur of the natural world where, in moments of epiphany, the smallness of the observer against the vastness of the world is thrown into sharp relief.
Those poets and painters devoted their art to pursuing and depicting this feeling, which had, for Turner, proven best articulated through giant, roiling skies, ships at full mast being thrown forward by winds on turbulent oceans, and dawn skies the colour of egg yolk.
The river and the wetlands are the equivalent for Wakefield, who continues to tease out new vistas and moments in this sublime local landscape.
Wakefield has achieved finalist positions in the Salon des Refusés, The Paddington Art Prize, The Heysen Prize for Landscape, and the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award, among others.
