Palimpsest, works by Meg Walters at Masterworks’ Rick Fairies Gallery

The word “palimpsest” carries both historical and metaphorical weight. In the medieval period, a palimpsest described those images revealed on a recycled manuscript page after upper layers of ink wore away. In a contemporary context, the term refers to layers of experiences, resurfacing, and commingling with the present world.

Meg Walters aptly adopted this term for her current exhibit at the Rick Faries Gallery at Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art. Curated by Jasmine Lee, curator of contemporary art at the museum, this exhibit speaks to the complexity of memories and spaces, and the intermingling of the two.

The works on view are undeniably landscapes, but not depictions of precise locations. They are sensations of place that Walters gathered from her collective experiences growing up in Bermuda, studying in London, and living in Australia.

Through elegant, jewel-like colours, Walters explores nostalgia centred on spaces, both literally and emotionally oriented. Past moments — or feelings, or experiences — inform the present, which Walters uses to destabilise the visual impression of the landscape. She sees it as a site, but also as a metaphor.

“It’s like shape-shifting,” said Lee. “As soon as an image comes to view, it morphs into another image and acts as both simultaneously.” This is true for both the artist and the viewer.

In the mixed media work A Time for Codfish, Another for Kites, for example, Walters creates one such opportunity. Here, the foreground trees shape a broad bay and dreamlike sky, under which a silhouetted figure cleans a fish along the shore. For those familiar with Bermuda’s shoreline, the setting recalls Devonshire Bay, where fishermen come with their local catch.

As quickly as this association is made, though, the very same painting leads the viewer away towards other associations and contexts. The trees do more than layer the space; they evoke the erosion of the landscape in a visual approximation of time passing. Those shapes are there, then they’re not; they hover over the background as if competing with the memory.

Walters recognises how Bermuda’s natural forms remain with her in Australia. There is some natural parity between her background here and her home in New South Wales, to be sure. As she paints, her memories of the one emerge beneath, through, and above the painted surface. She remembers Devonshire Bay, and the kites flown on Good Friday commemorated in the title, but does not literally depict it.

The personal recollection of the landscape and its mutation over time is only one layer of the palimpsest. She also addresses, if subtly, the actual erosion of the land hastened in the modern world by climate change. In Bermuda, as in other subtropical locales, one is constantly aware of the natural flux found in nature.

Like many on the island, Walters recalled the collapse of Bermuda’s Natural Arches after Hurricane Fabian in 2003. Although not overtly ecological in spirit, her work speaks to the effects of time on the landscape. The irretrievability of the past, while also being physical, is also demonstrated through the reworked, layered surfaces of her paintings.

These surfaces are powerfully evocative and, seen as a group in the Rick Fairies Gallery, speak collectively, partly due to the consistency of her palette. Although it is by no means uniform, colours are interrelated throughout the gallery.

Most of the paintings are underpainted with a tangerine hue, which Walters allows to remain on the surface in several places, hovering underneath layers of teal and mahogany, or ochre and chartreuse. These are colours not meant to recreate a picturesque island view, but to transport the viewer to a past moment, or to multiple past moments.

For Walters, the application of chroma is both an additive and subtractive process. By adding then removing, then adding again, she uses texture to offer a suggestion rather than a statement. In Slow Slip Into Oblivion, for example, rock-like formations, reminiscent of the Natural Arches, capture the erratic quality of a patinaed surface or the honeycombs of a coral outgrowth.

None of this would be possible without Walters’s curiosity about oil paint and what it can do. “I don’t start with a set idea of the final composition,” she described. “Instead, I am more interested in how the painting evolves, both texturally and chromatically.”

Walters will further discuss her artistic process on Thursday, May 7, at an artist’s talk in the Masterworks.

Ultimately, Walters uncovers a palimpsest on the surface of her paintings. The paintings emerge; they appear. At the same time, they conceal, and they blur. Like memory and experience, they operate as superimposed layers of shifting imagery.