QUIET ROOMS, WIDE WATER - LUCY O’DOHERTY

1 - 28 JUNE 2026

Opening 2pm Saturday 13 June

In Quiet Rooms, Wide Water, Lucy O’Doherty explores the quietude of domestic spaces alongside the vastness of large bodies of water.

Working in both soft pastel and oils on linen, Lucy explores houses, interiors and landscape features with a restrained and luminous sensibility. The pastel works possess a quiet beauty, executed with a lightness of touch and depth of understanding that speaks to long practice, careful observation and an intuitive command of the medium. Subtle tonal shifts and delicate handling evoke atmosphere rather than description, inviting viewers into moments of stillness and reflection.

Across both mediums, Lucy is deeply interested in the relationship between internal and external light, and the way it shapes colour, mood and perception. Window frames become important compositional devices — boundaries that contrast the intimacy of quiet interior spaces with the theatricality and changing drama of the world outside. Yet rather than separating these realms, the window acts as a bridge between them, suggesting that the same sense of drifting calm and contemplation can be found in both the domestic interior and the broader landscape beyond.

Since graduating from the National Art School in Sydney in 2011, Lucy has exhibited regularly throughout Australia and in New Zealand. She was the winner of the Interior Art Prize 2025 (Weswal Gallery), the recipient of the prestigious Brett Whitely Travelling Art Scholarship in 2016 and won the Drawing Prize at Hornsby Art Prize in 2024. She has collaborated with Australian fashion labels and was commissioned to create a body of work to promote an educational short film series. To see a full history of Lucy’s exhibitions and awards, please see the link below to the full catalogue, artist’s statement and biography.