Domestic Icons – “Objects holding memories of past generations, interwoven with invisible threads of love and loss and the intricate patterns that hold my focus and bring joy.
(The flowers have mostly been grown on our balcony garden).”
Margaret Ackland is a highly respected Australian artist whose practice is renowned for its bold use of colour, intricate layering, and poetic attention to the overlooked details of everyday life.
Working primarily in large-scale watercolours, she creates works that are both technically rigorous and visually arresting, transforming household items, trinkets, and fragments of domestic life into luminous reflections on presence, memory, and identity. By magnifying these objects to monumental proportions, Ackland invites viewers to reconsider their intimacy and significance, elevating the ordinary into the extraordinary.
Ackland’s career achievements are considerable. A four-time Archibald Prize finalist and winner of the Portia Geach Memorial Award in 1988, she has been selected for the prize eleven times, including receiving the People’s Choice Award in 2021. Ackland has held over thirty solo exhibitions since 1985, and her works are represented in national collections such as Artbank, the Mitchell Library, the Holmes à Court Collection, and Deakin University. Her regional solo exhibition in 2016 The Watercolour News at Gippsland Art Gallery transformed daily newspapers into painterly meditations on media and information. She has also been featured in Italian Vogue, profiled on ABC TV’s Compass, and commissioned in 2018 to produce a significant large-scale work for the Intercontinental Hotel in Bangladesh.
By blurring still life and portraiture, Ackland elevates the domestic into the extraordinary, creating works that are intimate, expansive, and deeply human.
A four times Archibald finalist, Margaret Ackland is renowned for her expressive and vibrant use of colour. She won the Portia Geach Portrait Prize in 1988 and has been selected for the Portia Geach Prize 11 times, winning the People's Choice Award in 2021.
Intercontinental Hotel, Doha Bangladesh; Artbank; Christ Church St Laurence; Deakin University, Holmes a Court, Mitchell Library, Sydney; Pharmacy Guild of Australia; Phillips Fox; Scotts College; Sydney Grammar School; Trinity Grammar School; Uniting Church of Australia; University of Sydney; Willoughby Library and private collections in Australia and overseas.
2023 ‘The Big Book of Little Art Essays’, Flinders Lane Gallery
2023 Art Almanac, 'Flowers, Abstraction, Landscape', Dr Judith Pugh
2022 Art Almanac
2012 Artist Profile Magazine. Not The Way Home. Issue 18
2011 Rosemary Crumlin, The Blake Book. MacMillan. pp.193,204
2009 Author, Title, Art Monthly, October
2008 Author, Title, Sydney Magazine, Sydney Morning Herald
Author, Title, Elle Italia, Spring
Compass, ABC Television, 1 June
2007 Author, Seldom Scene, Mitchell Library
2006 Katrina Lobley, ‘Events’, Sydney Morning Herald, 29 June
Sunanda Creagh, Open Gallery, Sydney Morning Herald, 1 June
D.W. Thorpe, Who’s Who of Australian Visual Artists, publisher, 2nd edition
1994 Susan McCulloch, Australian Art Encyclopedia, Allen & Unwin
1990 Max Germaine, Artists and Galleries of Australia, Craftsman House
1987 Dawn Mendham, The Refining Fire, Albatross Books, pp.18-25
1985 Exhibition Commentary, Art and Australia, Fine Arts Press, vol.23, no2 p.173
1993 Judi Fisher et al., A Place at the Table, JBCE, pp.47-53,84
Claire de Carteret, writer, had the pleasure of chatting with Margaret in her studio for her upcoming solo exhibition ‘Tipping Point’.“I’ve always been entranced by the visible world” -…
Margaret Ackland gives an artist talk at Stanley Street Gallery on Saturday 26 August 2023 about her exhibition 'Tipping Point'. Gallery Directors: Liza Feeney and Merilyn Bailey Artist: Margaret Ackland…
Amy Dynan, Margaret Ackland & Oscar Martin De Burgos
Sydney Contemporary 2025 | BOOTH J10
September 11-14, 2025