About Wendy

Wendy Stokes practice is driven and filtered through her experiences of the natural environment; making images which allow for moments of pause and a celebration of spirit. Her work shifts between painting,drawing and printmaking disciplines where one informs the other.

Stokes lives by the ocean and draws from her deep connection to this landscape and those connected to personal histories. Her works purposefully wrestle with ambiguous ground; between the Romantic lineage of landscape representation and Modernist Abstraction, while also challenging contemporary notions between drawing and painting. [1]

Playing with notions of space, Stokes fuses ambiguous islands of floating colour and lyrical markmaking, punctuated by contradictions and triggers pulled directly from landscape. The works present as residues of lived encounter; documentations to sensorial grabbing's as one moves through a landscape; while drawing from the archaeology of memory.

They are works which resonate with collective meaning, connecting to sites of private territory, experienced terrains; inviting the viewer to embark on an immersive encounter into landscapes which universally bind us; connecting  experiences from the recesses of memory- the mutable edges of ocean and gardens from childhood.

[1]Through a reflective process of journey and return Stokes has maintained a sustained engagement with Claude Monet's Nymphéas suite; exploring it as a collective image and vessel to memory. Late in 2010 Stokes visited Paris and returned in 2014 as part of an Internationale des Arts Cite Residency which included extended access to Monet's garden in Giverny, (courtesy Fondation Claude Monet); and field research in the coastal terrain of Étretat, Normandy.