“The notion of The Well is rich in metaphorical and symbolic potential for Melbourne-based artist Sarah Walker. Doubling as the title for her third book for Perimeter Editions, the idea serves as a site of foreboding, reflection and renewal – a place where currents of past, present, and future purl and fold.
The project’s formative images emerged out of a period of great solitude and personal upheaval for Walker, who describes these early gestures as a private series of ‘contemplations on love, heartbreak, grief, family, and uncertainty’. She had no plans to show the images; they existed as mere studies of a time and personal state. It was only after visiting a psychic – an exercise in breaking out of a rut – that things began to shift. The artist recalls the experience vividly. ‘She knew about the people closest to me, the decisions I was facing, and what I cherished,’ recalls Walker. ‘[The psychic] prophesied the images I was already making.’
The resulting sequence takes the form of a kind of feedback loop. Fragments of architecture, landscape, and the natural world bracket intimate, gently skewed portraits of loved ones; analogue detritus and other more purposeful interventions and incursions breach the frame. Elsewhere, Walker upends and abstracts landscapes that may have otherwise tended toward the picturesque; simple gestures and shifts in orientation claw at our perceptive resolve. These photographs are quieter and subtler than the more frenetic images and juxtapositions that populated Walker’s award-winning first book Second Sight (2017) and the harrowing architectures of her 2019 book Pelči Manor.
Blurring the lines between history, personal experience and potential futures, Walker reimagines the visual languages of family, friendship and landscape through the lens of the sacred and dreamlike. Reflective at its very core, The Well is a book of soft premonitions.”
SECOND SIGHT
Second Sight by Sarah Walker is the winner of the inaugural 2018 Perimeter Small Book Prize.
Taking its bearings from the adage that seeing is believing, the debut book from young Melbourne photographer Sarah Walker, Second Sight, assumes a cynical vantage on our collective relationship with spirituality, faith, ritual and the search for meaning. Utilising the trickery of photography, Walker reframes and appropriates fragments of the everyday to imbue them with the loaded atmosphere of the ephemeral and the arcane. The resulting body of work proves as speculative and enigmatic as it is arresting and dynamic – a space where the image of refracted light, moving water or birds in flight becomes a foil for arcing bodily gestures, clasped hands, arrangements of rocks and abstracted, deconstructed portraiture. Here, we find ourselves enmeshed in the artifice of this fraught search for meaning, where each and every instance becomes a potential sign.
“Photography itself is ritualistic and performative, and at times requires repetitive action to achieve its intended results,” writes the artist. “It has a creator.” As such, Walker posits her photographic practice to operate in a kind of unlikely parallel to that of spiritual practices. “Similar to those who project meaning onto refracted light, this body of work re-contextualises and uses the connection between images to depict a new grasp on reality. My own spiritual space.”