Reflection and Dreams – How Ellie Walker’s Paintings Lucidly Process and Disrupt Memory

Ellie Walker’s paintings swirl in ambiguous, childlike dream-states, floating in memories and unbinding emotions from their associative experiences. The result is a progression of paintings drawing on imprecise faces and bodies, liquid contours, and playful vibrancy. She tells me: “The symbolic language I use often comes from memories, my imagination or my surroundings. I begin with drawings that come from experiences or situations that have left me with a particular feeling, as I find it to be a form of release. However, I will then begin to make more drawings, repeating some of the imagery, but creating new, imaginary and ambiguous settings that are playful and fun, yet still reminiscent of a particular memory I had.”

Her images are deliberately unspecific, creating strange worlds that are begging myriad interpretations, meanings depending entirely on the individual dreams and unconscious triggers of the viewer. Like many artists, the fact that people are able to respond to her work in so many different ways is itself a vindication. Walker is happy to keep the source materials – the experiences from which she initially paints – to herself. She issues no correct interpretations and is just happy when the art moves people.

But these vibrant scenes do indeed come – at least initially – from certain places and memories. She explains: “All of my paintings refer to specific incidents, memories and feelings. My earlier work was more concerned with past events and childhood memories; however, my most recent works are now dealing with my experience of living with anxiety and how it affects my day to day life.”

The ‘disruption’, which the painting part of the process can bring, could also be described as ‘play’, though she also admits that sometimes the disruptions could be described as ‘accidents’. Accidents are happy in her case, as it is through them that the level of spontaneity critical to her work is achieved. Her art has become progressively more spontaneous, playful, and accidental as she’s become more adept at trusting her instincts, knowing when to reverse over deliberated aspects and ‘disrupt’. While her earlier paintings had clearer shapes and forms, her more recent works have clearly been repainted, painted over, and flipped. She tells me: “Sometimes I have a jolt reaction to flip a painting on its side when it’s not working or if it feels too deliberate and obvious, so I completely re-work them and turn them into something new altogether, covering up figures and creating new forms where I have left areas from the original painting to show through in some places. An example of this process would be with my paintings 'And even though her new boots sat right beside her, she still felt dreadful' and 'Can you please get your feet off my table' and 'Enablers'.”

These reconfigured paintings are the ones she views as her most successful in that they have that spontaneity for which she strives. And it’s in these unbounded scenes that her work is most dreamlike and also most evocative, expressing emotions and memories in their most innate and unfettered flows, allowing the viewer to be drawn into their own subconscious dream worlds free from associative triggers. The feeling can be overwhelming, bringing up a well of forgotten emotions with a strange timeless lucidity. For the artist the process is often therapeutic, acting as a way of processing experiences of anxiety – lived today and remembered from the past.

As with any dream that lingers in your waking state, Walker’s artworks invite you to reflect on memories and feelings you long to remember and yet can’t quite grasp.