The work of Sarah Walker is resolutely non-objective yet it articulates pictorially a need for an exchange to take place between an echo of the mimetic and an equally adamant desire to renounce the eschewing of all illusionistic content and explicit subject matter. This simultaneous divergence is the chief quality in the artist's work and it is the source of for the hieratic quality of magical omnipotence that exudes from each painting. The aesthetically pure experience that Walker’s artwork drives home comes out of a variety of complex psychic satisfactions, apart from the need for transcendence. These satisfactions, according to Erich Fromm, include what he has called "...the need for relatedness, ...for rootedness, for a sense of identity, and for a frame of orientation and an object of devotion and effectiveness".
Each of these are made manifest in Walker’s artwork that is interested in presenting to the spectator an experience that relates both to the quality of edges and in the relations between mass and color. More particularly the artist suggests through the careful balancing of organic and non-organic visual codes in her work that she distills from things that are man-made or natural or a combination of the two. The artist writes: “Structures found within technology, the sciences, nature and architecture provide the internal organization and logic for my paintings. Through successive layers I inset intricate geometries within what seems to be sinking archipelagos and dissolving perspectival systems, which are themselves the residue left over from past layers. In this way spaces emerge, transform and then decay, always leaving a trace in the final painting.”
Drawing from a vocabulary consisting of painting’s ‘formal’ history, the digital vernacular and the timeless trajectory of the cosmos, Walker’s mark making charts the paths of numerous shifting systems. Working in acrylic on wood panels, her hand is the constant, articulating with relentless precision diverging elements, ranging from the luminous to the tranquil. In the simultaneous viewing of these realms, a larger dialogue becomes available as we come to view our current digital vernacular in conversation with a history free of linear constraints.