Metamorphosis: Meg Walters

MAY 15 - 30

Metamorphosis marks a sea change in Meg Walters’ lyrical engagement with place and personhood. She has long traced the geographies of the mind in those of the earth, recognising in the natural world a metaphor for memory.

Rhythms of flux, of formation and dissolution, the slow accumulation of sediment, its precipitous erosion – these shape in equal measure inner and outer landscapes. Such reflections now find a more personal register in remembered places made dreamlike by distance.

In painting and sculpture, Meg returns to impressions from the island of her youth, to the crystalline waters and rocky coast of Bermuda, along which she was raised. Folded into her luminous compositions are allusions to Bermudian life – the fishing that shaped her afternoons, a childhood spent in view of the ocean – and to the island’s myths and magic.

The scenes she describes in oil are lambent with memory’s afterglow, and gently lamenting. That many of the coves and caves the artist recalls have all but disappeared, degraded over time by hurricanes and reclaimed by the sea, has set her memories adrift, the altered coastline a simile for her mind’s many fragments.

Similarly drifting, an assemblage composed of rope and fishing line with ceramic objects – reminiscent of coral or sunken treasure transfigured in briny depths – appears as subconscious flotsam washed up onto the shore of the self.

The ties that bind Meg’s recollections to the world, much like her salvaged rope, have frayed. Yet however untethered, these memories do not so much fade but are transformed – phosphorescent against the dark tide of forgetting.

Words by Lucienne Bestall