There is a poetic beauty about Margaret’s paintings of waterlilies, a series initiated upon discovery of pools of water in the gulf country of northern Australia. An oasis amongst the harsh bushland, the pools were laden with waterlilies, Margaret writing of her absorption amongst expansive rock formations and pandanus trees that contrasted with the cool reflective water. The drama of light and shade implied “some sense of underlying meaning, hidden but profound” while the waterlilies, “floating in the mirrored space of the sky, represented at once both the generative nature of the place, and the vast depth and extent of its containing element.”

The “place” and the waterlilies influenced many of Margaret’s subsequent paintings, the strands of the waterlilies reaching from the depths of the ponds. 

This work suggests the haziness of the water, bubbling springs preventing a view of what lay beneath. Margaret wrote of her response to swimming amongst the plants and thinking about the generations of hands that had touched the polished stone. The Waterlily, like many of her landscapes, is deeply mindful of the ancestral history of the landscape, the jewel of the peach-coloured waterlily a sign of its life and beauty.

References

Gavin Fry, Margaret Woodward: Paintings 1950-2002, Sydney, Beagle Press, 2002, p.99.