The Well

The notion of The Well is rich in metaphorical and symbolic potential for Melbourne-based artist Sarah Walker. Doubling as the title for her third book for Perimeter Editions, the idea serves as a site of foreboding, reflection and renewal – a place where currents of past, present, and future purl and fold.

The project’s formative images emerged out of a period of great solitude and personal upheaval for Walker, who describes these early gestures as a private series of ‘contemplations on love, heartbreak, grief, family, and uncertainty’. She had no plans to show the images; they existed as mere studies of a time and personal state. It was only after visiting a psychic – an exercise in breaking out of a rut – that things began to shift. The artist recalls the experience vividly. ‘She knew about the people closest to me, the decisions I was facing, and what I cherished,’ recalls Walker. ‘[The psychic] prophesied the images I was already making.’

The resulting sequence takes the form of a kind of feedback loop. Fragments of architecture, landscape, and the natural world bracket intimate, gently skewed portraits of loved ones; analogue detritus and other more purposeful interventions and incursions breach the frame. Elsewhere, Walker upends and abstracts landscapes that may have otherwise tended toward the picturesque; simple gestures and shifts in orientation claw at our perceptive resolve. These photographs are quieter and subtler than the more frenetic images and juxtapositions that populated Walker’s award-winning first book Second Sight (2017) and the harrowing architectures of her 2019 book Pelči Manor.

Blurring the lines between history, personal experience and potential futures, Walker reimagines the visual languages of family, friendship and landscape through the lens of the sacred and dreamlike. Reflective at its very core, The Well is a book of soft premonitions.