What appears calm, elegant and ordered conceals uncertainty and distress. Ackland once again brings a deeply sensitive observations of the complexity of human experience to the table, encouraging viewers to interrogate their own perceptions of the fragile balance between the personal and the political.
Catalogue Essay by Elli Walsh 2026
Margaret Ackland creates a radiant poetics of the everyday, where representation is less about fidelity than about the volatility of seeing itself. For more than four decades, the Sydney-based artist has worked across still life, landscape, and portraiture, weaving intimate observations into an ongoing meditation on perception.
Ackland’s practice sits within an Australian lineage of painterly observation, where the everyday is re-coded through heightened visual intelligence rather than straightforward depiction. In her still lifes, the domestic interior becomes a site of controlled instability, as reflective surfaces, patterned grounds and carefully arranged objects conjure dynamic tensions. Her recent series Reflections moves away from the genre’s historical function and instead treats the tabletop or interior as a stage of optical negotiation. These works are less concerned with symbolic abundance or domestic intimacy than with the mechanics of looking: how colour, reflection and pattern destabilise the familiar.
“I’m painting what’s around me, and what I’m thinking about,” Ackland explains, “it’s the pleasure of looking”. Her works humbly record the artist’s love of home and garden, and yet they do far more than this. Ordinary objects – glassware, flowers, ceramics, printed textiles – are orchestrated into charged visual fields where spatial depth is both asserted and undone. In works such as Mexican Crossroads and Narcissus, Observed, the still life becomes a kind of pictorial pressure system as decorative textiles melt into the florals they ostensibly frame, causing a vivacious collapse of background and foreground.
Colour plays a similarly destabilising role in this series. Working with high-key palettes and jolting chromatic contrasts, Ackland marries mustards with mauves, saturated reds and pale washes. The result is a visual vibration that keeps the eye in motion, producing paintings that behave less like static still lifes than active perceptual events. Importantly, these works retain the immediacy of watercolour while resisting its associations with delicacy or spontaneity. Ackland employs the medium with architectural precision: translucent washes coexist with dense black contouring, and fluidity is counterbalanced by compositional control.
In some works, Ackland’s handling of surface and translucency uses reflection as both formal and symbolic anchor. “I love the incidental reflections that reveal the room the work was made in,” she notes. Glass vessels, silverware, and glossy textures allow light to become structurally active, often reflecting small, distorted self portraits. Within the polished curve of a silver spoon in Here & There, the artist’s reflection emerges, phone in hand, capturing the very object she has painted. This quietly self-reflexive gesture folds the act of looking back into the image itself. Here, we also glimpse a tiny portrait of her husband relaxing in their home – a fleeting self-inscription that, in the artist’s own words, “invites the viewer to step into my world”.
Beneath the optical flourish of Ackland’s works lies a more conceptually charged undercurrent. Her Spode plates and vessels subtly depict a world mired in unrest and instability, where figures clipped from newspapers enact scenes of suffering and devastation. Ackland comments, “This series is a visual diary of what’s happening inside, but also outside. It’s a personal diary, and a political one.” In Commemorative Plate 2025, victims of war are juxtaposed against a spectral rendering of lungs — a tacit allusion to the artist’s own experience of undergoing lung treatment over the past year.
Across these luminous paintings, Ackland traces slippages between observation and construction. Her still lifes extend the inherited language of the genre while moving it closer to contemporary image culture: layered, unstable, saturated, and constantly reorganising itself.
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Margaret Ackland has been a finalist the Hazelhurst Art on Paper Award (People's Choice Winner 2023, 2021, 2019), the Portia Geach Portrait Prize (2024, 2023, 2022, People's Choice Winner 2021, 2004), the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize (2022), the Salon des Refusés (2020), the Gallipoli Prize (2014), and the Blake Prize (2012, 2008, 2007). Her work has been featured in Italian Vogue and on ABC TV's Compass Series. In 2012 she was included in 'Not the Way Home: 13 Artists Paint the Desert', a group expedition organised by Artist Profile Magazine and exhibited at the National Trust S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney. In 2016 Ackland held a major regional solo exhibition of 'The Watercolour News' at the Gippsland Art Gallery in Sale.
In 2018 Ackland was commissioned to create a major work for the new Inter Continental Hotel in Bangladesh, the country's first major international hotel. Ackland's work is represented in a range of national collections including Artbank, the Holmes a Court Collection, the Bennett Art Collection (USA) and Deakin University .
