Patricia Gill, Denmark Bulletin
Denmark-raised Wendy Binks’s exhibition, Elephant Dreaming, will reveal the origins of her renowned animal paintings in works featuring birds threading through leviathan images.
The author and illustrator of children’s books, Where’s Stripey, Scrambled Eggs and Invincible Me, has turned her attention to the landscapes of her childhood that shaped her early creative life.
The works of rocks, water and sky bear the same bold palette as Wendy’s animal illustrations and the same attention to presence.
The series, in layered acrylic, gestural marking and saturated colour, tell stories, and birds, which have always been part of Wendy’s visual language, are woven throughout.
Black cockatoos, a spotted pardalote in a red flowering gum, splendid fairy wrens anchor the boulders in movement and life.
As a child Wendy grew up on a dairy farm living in muddy boots, with salty hair and animals everywhere.
She swam at nearby Greens Pool and among the boulders at Elephant Rocks.
Wendy recalls how the rocks felt like sleeping giants, ancient creatures resting in the tide.
“I wanted to return there,” she said.
Her idea was to explore how landscape carries character and the curved forms lean into one another, their surfaces layered with violet, moss green and electric blue, the colours animating stone.
“It’s still about presence but the presence of place itself,” Wendy said.
After graduating from Curtin University with an art and design degree, Wendy started Stunned Emu Designs in Fremantle and moved from painted terra cotta to paintings, prints and children’s picture books.
Her father (Laurie Binks) was interested in wildlife and inspired her to be curious about animals.
“Australian wildlife has attitude, it has posture and presence,” she said.
“An emu doesn’t just stand there; it owns the paddock.
“A black cockatoo doesn’t just fly; it slices through the sky with purpose.”
Wendy hopes visitors to the exhibition will regain a sense of awe – ‘a childlike tilt of the head when something feels bigger than you’.
“I want people to feel the warmth of memory of sun on granite, the hush of water pooling between rocks, the sudden lift of black cockatoos crossing a sunset sky.
“If someone thinks, ‘I need to go and stand on that beach’ or ‘I’d forgotten how powerful the coastline is’, then I’ve done my job.”
The exhibition runs from March 16-May 1 in the Denmark Visitor Centre Gallery and is the last to be hosted there by the Denmark Chamber of Commerce.
An invitation-only opening will be held on Saturday, March 14. Chamber chief executive Gillian Corker said the exhibition was a fitting way to close this chapter.
“We’ve been proud to support many local artists in our gallery space over the years,” she said. “Wendy’s work is grounded in this landscape and our local community, and it feels like the right way to mark our final exhibition here.
This article appeared in Denmark Bulletin, 12 March 2026.
