Anne Walton

Born 1955, Melbourne, Australia

Anne Walton enacts a pursuit of the private and the socialised self. In her efforts to establish visual and aural counterparts for a variety of irreducible propositions at the delta of identity – interdicted femininity, hysteria, the phantasmal, the invisible, the unspeakable – Walton proffers herself as an experimental subject. Though not a Body Artist as such, her body's fibrous entirety is pressed into service as an executive instrument.

One of Walton's sustaining preoccupations is with language, or, more correctly, with its imprecisions and corruptions. It would be hard to dispel from the mind the image of the artist, clutching her tongue with her hand in slips of(f) the tongue, as she attempted discourse with her audience. Or that of Walton repeatedly sucking in and releasing the business end of a household torch, so that her face, now illuminated, now obliterated, oscillated between ecstasy and trauma. This action, too, was twinned with suggestively pre–verbal utterances. 

Torches figure prolifically in Walton's presentations, either as quotidian realities or plaster simulacra. They can be understood as sculptural shorthand for the shedding of light, memorialising, perhaps, a timid infant's battery–powered conquest of the dark. Walton herself functions as a psychic light–shedder, broadcasting in bright trajectories across the shadowed terrain of the long–forgotten and the subconsciously suppressed.

Bruce James from the 1998 Samstag catalogue, Samstag 98 : This Thing Called Art
 
1998 Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship
1998 MFA, Glasgow School of Art, Scotland, United Kingdom
1997 Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours), South Australian School of Art, University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia
1985 Bachelor of Law, University of New South Wales, Sydney
1975 Bachelor of Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney