Love Paintings // Kate Walters

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Viewing Walters's totemic figures, so delicately rendered in Rorschach-esque watercolour, for the first time, is as though peering into the very cycles of life and death. These paintings show both an abstract interest and material contact between the primordial and the universal -- a suggested communion with that same spirit who first cast images on those low-lit caves in Lascaux. Indeed, like them, it is not so much figure Walters's works seek to represent: her preoccupation is rather with movement, with spirit and sensation, with being itself.

Stark patches of canvas invite the viewer to configure the beasts and burdens of Walters's Cornwall in a kind of prehistoric vocabulary. Her paintings oscillate between scenes of the hunt and the weald, but also the mother in the home and the hallowed grounds that provide their context.

Theirs is Cornish sand and soil, of that place's magicks and phantasms, in its fables and folksongs, in the very stains of its birth and its struggle. Joy, creation, labour and power, the gods and a truth caught between the seats of the physician and the psychoanalyst are the murky zone of these paintings and all permeate both execution and concept.