Wendy Stokes
Wendy Stokes is exhibited widely, in major public institutions including Glasshouse Port Macquarie and in respected commercial galleries.
Her artwork is held in significant private and public collections including National Gallery of Australia and Art Gallery NSW.
Wendy’s practice is recognised for its signature mark making and spatial qualities engaging with contemporary landscape painting.
Shifting Territory
4 March - 4 April 2026
Luminance Gallery Port Macquarie
Walking within a landscape for Wendy Stokes becomes a portal into an interior, one to be explored as a form of mapping shifting psychological terrain.
Stokes lives opposite the ocean, the rugged headlands and shorelines of Port Macquarie, Guruk, and has consistently walked and swum in these atmospheric fluid spaces for six decades. Such familiarity and routine has been pivotal to informing her practice; triggering potent connections to the psychological imprint one embeds on place and conjures metaphors around strength, fragility, loss, renewal and nurture.
Shifting Territory is a grouping of works merging these experiences of walking, with gardens from throughout her life as vessels of layered history. Collectively these familiar territories become a medium to explore ideas of ‘the garden’ and landscape as places of ‘uncertain sanctuary’; spaces that offer refuge while remaining provisional, permeable, and unstable.
Rather than depicting shelter as fixed or architectural, the work attends to sanctuary as a condition—one that is felt, remembered, and continually negotiated.
“I am drawn to the fragile persistence of flowers within inhospitable environments; moments where petals emerge between stone—small, vulnerable forms surviving within a harsh coastal landscape—as potent symbols of endurance, care, and temporality.”
Stokes’ practice is further reinforced by Robert Macfarlane’s writing on landscape as a site of deep time, layered language, and embodied knowledge. The act of walking and attunement resonates with her interest in mark-making as a slow, responsive negotiation with place.
Similarly, Annabel Abbs’ exploration of women who walk foregrounds movement as a mode of creative thinking and resistance.
Wendy has been awarded an MFA Research UNSW Art and Design; Graduate Diploma Visual Arts, Sydney College of the Arts, Sydney and undergraduate Visual Arts at Newcastle College of Advanced Education, Newcastle.
Her work has been a finalist in The Glover Prize; EMSLA, The Fleurieu Water Prize, Country Energy Landscape Prize; Sunshine Coast Art Award; Fishers Ghost Award; Dobell Prize for Drawing and three times finalist and acquisition in The JADA prize.
Collections include National Gallery of Australia; Art Gallery New South Wales; Warrnambool, Tamworth, Grafton, Bathurst, Gosford, Port Macquarie Glasshouse, Coffs Harbour, Manly and Geelong Regional Galleries; Newcastle University; Charles Sturt University; Parliament House, Canberra and extensive corporate collections.