Mangrove Swamp
Artist, horticulturalist, and educator, Margaret Barwick has had a lifelong interest and passion for tropical plant life that is rivalled only by her love of painting. Barwick played a significant role in the early growth of the Visual Arts Society and Garden Club in the late 1970s and was a founder and landscape designer of Cayman’s Queen Elizabeth II Botanic Park. This painting captures the quiet stillness of the mangrove swamp, which represents the Island’s ecological heart and still covers large tracts of Grand Cayman.
About the Artist
Margaret Barwick
b. 1931
New Zealand-born Margaret Barwick arrived in the Cayman Islands from New Zealand in 1977 via the Solomon Islands, Kiribati, and Malawi. She quickly became involved in the establishment of Visual Arts Society, the Islands’ first formal art collective. Subsequently, she headed the first Cayman Islands contingent to Carifesta IV in Barbados in 1981, designed national stamps and Tortola’s J. R. O’Neal Botanic Gardens, played a leading role in the design of the Cayman Islands’ Queen Elizabeth II Botanic Park, and wrote the authoritative Tropical and Subtropical Trees: A Worldwide Encyclopaedic Guide (2004). Barwick’s work has been exhibited in London, New Zealand, Malawi, Barbados, France, and the Cayman Islands. NGCI exhibitions include a solo retrospective of her work titled Screens, Greens and Washing Machines (2008), as well as the group exhibitions Tropical Visions (2019) and Terra Botanica: Depictions of Nature from the National Collection (2021). In 2022 Barwick was honoured with a CNCF Gold Star for Creativity.
