Stephen Walter’s work is an investigation into obsessive drawing techniques, semiotics, the glory of maps, and where Landscape is seen a receptacle for meaning. Each work is an intricate world in itself. The maps are a tangle of words, symbols and drawn elements where cultural residues inhabit certain locations. These in turn make up a complex of autobiographical references, epithets, hidden associations and wider contradictions. The landscape works draw the viewer’s gaze from grand viewpoints into the emersion of microscopic details. They observe the reoccurring patterns found in nature, and the graphic forms past down from one generation to the next, over long periods of time.
Through mainly drawing, painting, photography and printmaking, he explores the phenomenon of personal and collective experiences of place – both real and fictional. The inner view and its mark-making processes are forced to mingle with the shared space of the outside world – its culture, politics and its relational aesthetics – what he likes to call ‘inherited histories’. It is in this middle ground where Walter’s sensibilities lie, between the visions of an individual and those shared in Culture.