Understory (Dusk)

Meg Walters’ new series, Rewilding explores the emotional and psychological resonance of place and the ways landscapes shape both personal and collective memory. Drawing from experiences of growing up in Bermuda, studying in London, and living in Australia, Walters creates paintings that navigate the intersections of memory, identity, and environment. Inspired by childhood recollections, dreams, folklore, and poetry, her works blur distinctions between internal and external landscapes, using vibrant color, displacement, and layered imagery to destabilize fixed perceptions of place and reality. By combining multiple environments within a single composition, Walters seeks to evoke an emotional and intuitive response that transcends literal geography.

Developed through a process of continual application and removal of oil paint, the paintings reveal fragmented traces of earlier layers, creating surfaces that function as both physical and autobiographical excavations of time, history, and memory. In her series Rewilding, Walters turns her focus toward forests as symbolic and psychological spaces — realms associated with mystery, transformation, and the unconscious. Referencing folklore and Jungian psychology, the forest becomes more than a setting; it emerges as a metaphorical landscape of the psyche where fear, instinct, and self-discovery coexist. Through these richly layered works, Walters examines the transformative power of landscape and the enduring emotional imprint it leaves on human experience.