Meet the artist

Stephen Walter

Stephen Walter use a range of media in his work; he merges drawing, photography, digital, screen print and painting together and in the past few years he has investigated working with pencil onto paper.

These drawings have evolved through a fascination with maps, public and sub-cultural signs, symbols and obsessive tendencies. Here, the maps have developed their own identities, finding a parallel between the history of map making, its source materials and the culture that produced them.

Walter creates landscapes where objects are slowly taken over by their symbolic representations. Leaving us with forests of geographical map symbols and places where every inch is mapped and quantified for human purpose. The awe, so revered by Walter, is presented by the sheer volume of symbols, paired down and separated from their real state. Tackling the notions of our increasing distance from the Land and the outlook of a deeply troubling long-term future, Walter decides to use mundane elements of contemporary and municipal culture to hark back to a sublime space. Here, technology and information provides a new wilderness, unavoidable within the realms of a contemporary sublime. The tight drawing process mimics the growing environmental concerns for the need to cut back.

In a time where our relationship with the Natural Land is ever decreasing, references to Romanticism must change in accordance with present codes, practices and influences found in heavily urbanised environments. Representing classically beautiful landscapes, memory and the yearning for <Homelands> at present clash with the disenfranchisement of a lost wilderness into domesticated, sub-urban, plastic and supermarket-ridden environments. The limitations of a physical Romanticism must find new routes in the face of a landscape ever increasingly shaped by convenience. (Stephen Walter) 2006

Work by this artist