Palimpsest, an exhibition created by Meg Walters which opened on May 1st 2026, is interpreted as a ‘scraping back’, revealing a complex layering and erasure of materiality. Walters adopts the concept of Palimpsest materially and metaphorically, constructing the paintings through successive layers of application, concealment, and removal. Each gesture leaves a trace of visible history, allowing the works to accumulate a memory within themselves.
Bonfire Under Moonlight, 2025-26, oil on linen, 35x40 ins
Landscape provides the framework through which Walters explores these ideas. Drawing on coastline, gardens, and dense vegetation, her compositions move between reconstruction and observation. Recognizable elements like, trees, cliff faces, paths or expanses of water appear alongside flattened planes, abstracted forms and shifting perspective. The paintings are composed through overlapping passages of space, allowing foreground, middle ground, and distance to merge.
Walters works with layered combinations of muted earth tones, chalky whites, deep greens, blues, and flashes of saturated color that emerge through the scraped surface. Areas of exposed underpainting sit beside opaque passages of paint, creating subtle shifts in temperature, depth and light. These colours saturate the atmosphere and reveal the history embedded in each surface.
Click here to read the press release for the exhibition
About the Artist
Growing up in Bermuda and now residing in Australia, Walters has become more interested in the psychological and emotional residue of place than the place itself. Each painting becomes an exploration of memory, an unravelling of time, space and identity. She searches for that indiscernible quality or impact that holds our attention momentarily, gives us pause from our own thoughts and life to reflect.
The Foundering, 2025-26, oil on linen, 16x20 ins
The exhibition was available from May 1st - June 27th, 2026. Additionally, the Artist Talk was held on May 7th, and Artist Workshops were held on May 6th and June 9th, 2026.
Please see Meg Walters' website for more of her work.