Opening Reception Friday 14 September, 7 – 9pm

The MAC is pleased to present our latest exhibition in the Sunken Gallery: a series of works by Roxy Walsh, a Northern Irish artist currently living and working in London.

The paintings are watercolour on paper, small-scale, brightly coloured and full of pattern and incident that can be funny, sad, baffling, and tender. The images flit seamlessly between abstraction and cartooning, round eyes of assorted characters look out from the paintings, a red tongue licks a brilliant yellow sky, and a green owl with round black suns for eyes clings to the end of a branch.

These beings Walsh populates her paintings with have an often threadbare or washed out quality, like toys in a charity shop. There is a highly developed strain of sentimentality at work in these paintings, a kind of mysterious longing born from a desire to know about or to create a world for the inanimate, teasing very particular forms of life from paint.

Roxy Walsh approaches her work through making rather than planning, and the materiality of the paint is central to the images. Watercolour is the simplest of paints, there is very little difference between the pigment and the paint, so colours have naturally different consistencies, transparencies, viscosities, and opacities.

The title of this particular series, ‘Lady Watercolourist At Home’, may initially conjure up ideas of a romanticised domestic environment, but in fact this description alludes to a period in the artist’s life when she sublet her studio in order to work from home and care for her twin baby boys – not quite the idyll one might have imagined.

In addition to these works Roxy Walsh will make a large scale work directly onto the walls of the MAC’s Sunken Gallery.

Roxy Walsh is a lecturer in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, London.