‘Wald’s art is that of a disruptor:

Wald has a Jewish migrant heritage, her parents fled Poland after the war, her painting is connected to her culture, and history.

Wald is a diminutive figure, she is not the John Peter Russell who’s life, and figure is dominant in the landscape, she did not strap herself to rocks in a storm, in elegy to ‘Ulyseys and the sirens’ to see the scope of, and marvel of nature and have the gall to replicate it. To paint the oncoming storm. But paints the ever advancing destruction of climate change, and infuses it with the history, and ever ancient spirit of the barrenness of the Australian desert.

Wald’s process is of refining her work firstly by drawing, then through monotype -a painterly drawing- and eventually to the large-scale studio painting. This does not diminish the drawing in my mind. Her process, importantly, involves time. Years of refining, and active drawing. One must mention the debt she owes to the Art Vault in Mildura where she was resident in 2014, 2016, and 2018, and where many of these monotypes were printed, where numerous painterly problems were worked out before ever touching canvas.

Wald makes monotypes in monochrome, much later in her process she infuses her paintings with some colour. The darkness of the monotypes, the stark, shifting, line that moves from black through grey to papers, bold, white define these structures, define the picture plane. The monochrome lines like that of a wood engraving of a face delineate specificity, a particular indent or rise. The images after being obsessively drawn, then printed are indelibly stamped on the artists psyche for use in later work.’

— Dr Thomas Middlemost