Esther Thorniley-Walker was the 2023 Freelands Fellow at Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen.
Through her paintings, Thorniley-Walker tries to create the disorientating sense of being swept into nature’s chaos of movement. The physicality of paint, its built-up colours and her instinctive marks that overlap and merge together, conjure to her mind ‘the web of interconnecting roots of the forest and the tangled branches fighting for light and survival’.
Her artwork investigates the concept of wildness and the interrelationship of landscape and inhabitant. Folklore and symbolism are passed down and projected onto nature, changing our perception of the environment into anthropomorphic entities. She is increasingly preoccupied with nature's delicate balance between transience and permanence, as the natural world faces a precarious future.
Flown Wind in the Skin, 2023.
Image courtesy of the artist.
Esther Thorniley-Walker (b.1996, North Yorkshire, UK) graduated from University of Brighton in 2018, with a Fine Art Painting degree and University of York, with a History of Art MA in 2020. She had a solo show ‘As they’ve grown, so I stand’ at Look Again Project Space, Aberdeen. This was followed by ‘Painted Conversations III’ collaborative exhibition at Whitespace, Edinburgh.
Instagram: @estherthornileywalker
Banner image: Dancing Grief of Green, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist.