Always, The Water is a beautiful and significant new series of paintings by Wendy McDonald. These works continue her passion for interpreting the important, life-giving wetlands of her region. Each painting testifies to her love, connection and care for her precious local environment. Wendy McDonald is well-respected and highly collectible Australian landscape painter who we are proud to work with. 

ARTIST STATEMENT

"My lived experience of landscape holds complex emotions for me – joy and grief, celebration and frustration, all captured in the narrative of my paintings. This body of work includes response to two Murray Darling Icon Sites - in and around the Koondrook Perricoota Forest (including Thule Lagoon where I reside) and the Hattah Kulkyne National Park. Advocating for, living with and understanding the complexity of ephemeral floodplains in semi arid environments has meant that I read the landscape cycles, wet or dry, with one fundamental marker. Always. The Water.

Please take the time to read the following submission to the Murray Darling Basin Plan Review by my ecologist daughter Maggie. It captures beautifully the importance of the voices and experience of people of place when caring and advocating for landscape."

Maggie McDonald, Barapa Barapa Country, Thule, NSW (Wetland ecologist and 6th generation farmer)

Do you know what colour the trees turn after the rain on Barapa Barapa Country?

Time in place. 

Deep respect.

I hold a vision—one I hope is reality in 2038. A healed Murray Darling Basin. Not just its landscapes, but its people too.

What does healed Country look like?

What do healthy communities feel like?

I believe the healing of both rests on two things: time in place, and deep respect. Time in place must be recognised as a primary source of knowledge—grounded, lived intelligence that shapes decision making and ensures we do all we can to restore health and vitality to this place and its people.

And deep respect—for all.

Respect that runs through our veins.

Respect for First Nations peoples, their knowledge, and their enduring responsibility to Country.

Respect for the environment, and the wisdom held within the landscape.

Respect for every person connected to the Basin.

Water, understood and respected as the life force it is.

Water that serves many purposes, all in one place, at the same time—because that is what water does.

Water for drinking, for bathing, for living.

Water that sustains rivers, creeks, wetlands, flora and fauna—not just to survive, but to thrive.

Water that grows the food that sustains us.

This kind of respect creates a foundation strong enough to hold difficult conversations—and to design solutions to the complex challenges we face.

So if you don’t know what colour the trees turn after the rain on Barapa Barapa Country, spend time there. Be with the place. Be with its people. Then, and only then, make decisions on which its future depends.

BIO

Wendy McDonald lives and works on the flood plains at Thule, on Barapa Barapa country in South West NSW. Her work draws from the ecology of the local environment and the ebb and flow of the creeks and rivers in this significant inland delta. McDonald’s paintings are an unashamedly feminine interpretation of this ephemeral wetland landscape. She advocates strongly for water policy which reconnects and rehydrates country in these fragile places.
 

McDonald’s work has been shown in galleries across NSW and Victoria and is held in many private Australian and international collections. She was included in the 2018 Thames & Hudson publication A Painted Landscape, a survey of Australian landscape painting by Amber Creswell-Bell. McDonald has been a finalist in numerous awards including the NSW Parliament Plein Air Painting Prize (2016, 2017 & 2018), Paddington Art Prize, Calleen Art Prize and the Swan Hill Print & Drawing Acquisitive Prize. In 2022 she was a recipient of the Defiance Gallery, Nock Residency Award, in the Paddington Art Prize for Australian Landscape.