Artist and UNC alumna Sarah Walker is known for her unique acrylic paint-layering technique, which lends an element of accumulation to her work. As part of the Hanes Visiting Artist series, Walker will talk about her work on Tuesday. Her work is also on display in the John and June Allcott Gallery throughout January.
Staff writer Paige Hopkins spoke with Walker about her paintings and the stories behind them.
DAILY TAR HEEL: Some of your work was inspired by time spent with obsessive-compulsive hoarders, how did those experiences influence your work?
SARAH WALKER: For a period of many years, I spent the summers with my stepmother who at first did not manifest the signs of hoarding, but then each summer I would come back and find another layer of material, and it was all stacking up; it wasn’t organized in the typical way, it almost seemed like geological deposits.
I was quite fascinated by that because my biological mother, with whom I lived for the balance of the year, pretty much liked to throw everything away that was related to the past. And I liked to save everything. So being around my stepmother caused me to imagine a different reality in which everything could be saved.
DTH: Your new pieces deal with Chinese scholar’s rocks. What is a scholar’s rock, and how do they relate to your newest paintings?
SW: I wanted to actually have an object in my paintings, which was a shocker to me because I had basically rejected painting objects of any kind for years and years. But I knew my objects couldn’t just be the standard objects from the terrestrial world. They had to combine traits of spaces, of pattern, of object, of architecture; they had to be kind of like a multiple object all in one. As a model for that, because I had been interested in them for a long long time, I took the Chinese scholar’s rock.
What a Chinese scholar’s rock is is quite a curious phenomenon and quite a curious object. The scholar’s rocks for hundreds of years were these highly elaborate natural stones that would sit on the desks of scholars and poets as a way to give them access to maybe what we might call today their subconscious in terms of allowing a plethora in complexity in association to manifest with which they could build their scholarly, literary or poetic work.
Their form is so complex they’re almost formless, and yet, they’re endlessly evocative. I love that idea, and it serves me as the touchstone to think about how a painting could also be like that.
