Meg Walters: Skin on Skin

Meg Walters is an emerging visual artist based in Newcastle, NSW. Interested in how memory informs reality, she explores themes of identity, psychological paradigms, isolation and nostalgia. Originally from Bermuda with an education spanning the UK and Australia she has developed a strong desire to explore her own unique narrative through the motif of landscape.

Walters' solo exhibition Skin on Skin is a contemporary take on the human figure within landscape. A series that arose from a global pandemic, it aims to subvert the idea of landscape as sublime, swapping it for a new doctrine. One that places the emphasis on human connection as the most coveted outcome. Developed during 2020, a year rife with lockdowns and limited human interaction, the works within Skin on Skin pay homage to human touch and connection.

Drawing on her own memories of long days spent at the beach during the most stifling and lonely lockdown moments, Walters scripts a compelling story of nostalgia. Overlapping and interweaving human bodies at their most vulnerable and exposed at the beach, she aims to recreate the unsettled atmosphere of COVID-19. The anxiety of closeness, the inevitability of touch and simultaneously, the resistance and yearning for it.

Ironically, the traditional landscape genre placed emphasis on the unity of man and nature, while this series unpicks this concept to bring to the forefront the duality of man vs nature. How nature has turned on man to create a virus that has decimated life as we know it. Walters dissects this concept in Skin on Skin. The question lingers: How can we view nature the same way after it seems that it has turned its back on us?