Moments

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.

Wakefield finds her inspiration on a canoe, drifting leisurely down the narrow Wingecarribee in the early morning, or on foot, ‘locking’ what she sees in the mind before returning to her Southern Highlands studio to translate those impressions into paint. “These experiences foster an intimate connection with the landscape,” the artist says, “allowing its rhythms, atmosphere, and subtle transformations to reveal themselves over time.”

Through these repeated encounters, returning to the same places over and again, 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 second collection, following her 2025 debut, Capture. Romantic painters like J.M.W. Turner sought to capture the sublime in nature: moments of communion with the awe and grandeur of the natural world, when the smallness of the observer is thrown into sharp relief against its vastness.

For Turner, this feeling found expression in giant, roiling skies, ships at full mast thrown forward by winds on turbulent oceans, and peachy dawn skies. For Wakefield, the river and wetlands provide their own version of the sublime, as she continues to tease out new vistas and moments in this 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.

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