Sarah Walker received an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC and a BFA from California College of the Arts, Oakland, CA. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards including a Jacob Lawrence Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters 2014; Joan Mitchell Grant for Painters and Sculptors 2012; and a National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts, Visual Artists Resident Fellowship, Miami, FL, in three consecutive years from July-October 1994-96.
Walker states about her art:
I intend these paintings to operate as tools for recalibrating perception. They present a concentrated arena in which to experience simultaneous, interwoven, contradictory spaces and states of being.
Dynamics of accumulation underpin my work; I filter in not out. By permitting actions, no matter how awkward, to remain they possibly generate their own redemption on a later layer. A generous leeway exists layer to layer for preservation so that each action casts its line of development forward into the painting’s future.
Structures of various kinds provide the internal organization and logic for my paintings. Through successive layers I inset intricate geometries within sinking archipelagos and dissolving perspectival systems, which are themselves the acrylic residue left over from past liquid layers. Spaces emerge, transform, then decay, always leaving a trace in the final painting.
Ultimately, my paintings offer visual terms for the experience of multiple and ever more permeable realities. How does the mind consolidate an image or object that combines the physical, personal, spatial and virtual? How does it look to have both material and non-material spaces operate simultaneously? I look for moments of intensity where the cross-communication of dissimilar patterns form a moiré effect in the mind that can lead to thinking visually in interpenetrating information fields- the main subject of my work.
