Born in South Africa, Wendy began her career in textile design before immigrating to Australia, where she completed a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Textile Design at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). Wendy went on to design for leading brands in the textile design industry in Australia, the U.K., and South Africa.
After starting a family in Australia, she became involved in local community work and enjoyed working with communities and designers, promoting a communal sense of belonging through text and art imagery.
In 2019 Wendy was awarded a Global Excellence Scholarship to attend DJCAD, University of Dundee, Scotland, UK. She completed her MFAH Masters in Arts and Humanities and was subsequently admitted to the DJCAD practice-based PhD programme.
Her PhD: A Watery Lens: Artistic Practice and the Material Emergence of Knowing.
This practice-based research advances an original epistemological framework that reconceptualises water through what is termed an Aqueous Material-Energy Continuum. This continuum provides the conceptual ground for understanding water as patterned organisation within dynamic matter–energy relations. The research is engaged methodologically through what I describe as a ‘watery lens’, a disciplined orientation that attends to water’s patterned responsiveness without reducing it to symbol, metaphor, or representational subject. Within this framework, water is understood as a responsive field in which matter and energy co-emerge through processes of transformation.