Alexis Walters English, b. 1978
British artist Alexis Walters was born in London in 1978. Showing an interest in photographic images from a young age, it was whilst studying Architecture at Kingston University that she discovered her own talent for photography when frequenting the photography department and eventually studying photography full time at Kingston. Walters’ first exhibited project was from a body of work taken in Cuba in 2000, in which she captured the paradox between the smile and the hardship in every face, and between the visually rich surroundings and the social struggle.
In 2002, she set up her own dark room in her studio in Portobello Road where she would work on a mixture of personal projects and commissions; including performance photography, film stills, live music and portraits. During this period she discovered several vintage printing techniques which took her in a new direction with her personal work. Most recently her work has been an exploration of the human form, how it can be portrayed and the varying ways in which it can be manipulated, and to what ends. She is interested in distortions and layers of seeing, to express the physical and emotional.
Some of her more recent mixed media images express emotional ideas and feelings, personal history and truth. In her series “Unknown” she captures unknowable historical moments being fading in and out of reality. There is a certain sense of romantic nostalgia in Walters’ work.
She captures images exclusively on film, and uses a variety of mediums to print the negatives, often working in black and white, she also uses Cyanotype and Van Dyke techniques, as well as inks and acrylics to enhance the images.
In a recent project “Portrait of a Life” she combines Cyanotype prints with paint and ink; photographing everyday objects and imbuing them with meaning and importance, thus turning them into art.
Walters expresses that she loves mediums that have a sense of the unknown about them. “The camera and the enlarger are very precise tools, so I love printing techniques or mixing mediums that means you can't know the exact outcome till the process is completed. Using the sun to expose images, coating my own papers, literally painting with light in the dark, leaves so much to chance and I love that.”