Wendy Stavrianos is a distinguished artist who has maintained a unique vision since her first solo exhibition in 1967. She comes from a talented generation of artists, including George Baldessin and John Buckley, who studied at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Her work is informed by a deep identification with the landscape and the dualities inherent in nature and human existence. During a life characterised by change, Wendy Stavrianos has developed a complex iconography relating to particular 'sites of meaning' within her physical and psychological landscape. Her ability to tap into the 'archaic dreaming soul' of earth has given her work a mythic potency that is consistent with Aboriginal art yet also reveals her Celtic-Spanish background and the influence of the European old masters. The artist's preoccupation with cloth as a medium of expression began in childhood and was to become a metaphor for the life cycle. In the early 1970s her use of sewn line and intricate pen drawing in sculptural works of enormous scale transformed needlecraft into fine art. Since then Wendy Stavrianos has used cloth in painted and manipulated abstract works, figurative paintings, installations and sculptures. Among the artist's latest works are three-dimensional extensions of drawn and painted figures that she calls the 'gatherers'. Made from natural and manufactured materials, the gatherers stand in gallery or landscape settings as ritual figures of warning and protection in a society that applauds meaninglessness.