Although Sarah Walker’s painting can be appreciated in formalist terms alone, her painting exudes a strength derived from a unique sense of place, writes Ciarán Bennett
The first large painting of Sarah Walker that I remember seeing was over ten years ago; it was a large black and red spotted abstraction. I saw the blackberries, yet initially they appeared as a surface texture of abstract globules of black and red. It wasn’t until I got very close to the surface of this large painting that their organic structure exposed and recalled the appearance of berries. The unripe shadowed globules of red paint recede into their botanical position, the preconceived structure of plant observation dictated their integration with the black defining the structure of the perceived image
