Roxy Walsh makes rich, luxuriant paintings in watercolour onto paper, panel and linen. Pigment is soaked and washed, poured, set and stained into smooth, slow, absorbent surfaces. The women in the paintings are intensely and sensuously coloured but frozen in attempts to gesture, to signal, to mean: present yet inchoate.

‘Like bizarre hieroglyphs these figures never become characters in their own right, they don't appear capable of thoughts or a rich internal life but neither do they stand for anything except themselves. Rather this strange cast is grown out of paint and intuition…’ Dale McFarland, Felix Culpa, Article Press 2006

Inhabiting the surfaces of the paintings as words do, not yet sentences, these works posit painting as an arena where different registers of expression can coexist and proliferate, from the expletive to the absorbing, from the figurative or embodied to the formal and diagrammatic.
In her catalogue text, Walsh brings together other peoples’ words to allude to the elusive epiphanies of broken sense. This text develops her interest in how fiction and visual art can inflect and infect each other.

Roxy Walsh is an artist based in London, who also works collaboratively with Sally Underwood, most recently in Dependent Rational Animals at Towner in Eastbourne (Review - Art Monthly, Sept 13, George Vasey). Recent solo shows include Body Language at Galerie Peter Zimmermann, Mannheim (2013) and The Lady Watercolourist at the Mac, Belfast (2012).