WALK WITH YOU
4th May – 9th July 2023
Warrington Museum & Art Gallery
Introduction by Artist & AXIS Producer Lucy Wright
Walk With You is a collection of paintings, created in the Warrington area, by the artist Stefanie Trow, who lives in Manchester with her wife and children.
This exhibition of works predominantly on paper represents something of a departure for Trow, incorporating collage and found objects to create evocative, layered scenes whose subjects shift in and out of focus, like memories overlapping and coalescing. Many of the works have a timeless quality: warm, Kodachrome-tinted palettes conjure lazy summer afternoons and childhoods spent playing in the shade of benevolent trees, while others capture sodden skies and muddy footpaths, colours diluted but still springing with vitality.
Family is a key theme in the collection, as is place—and Trow is a prolific artist for whom life and practice are closely entwined. Indeed, one of the most striking features of this body of work—and something that coheres the pieces on display—is a quality of affect that speaks to unconditional love; love of family, love of landscape, love of work. This finds literal expression in the piece ‘Mummy, I love you’, in which the spontaneous inscription by the artist’s daughter on the underside of the collaged figure at some stage during the making process is incorporated into the final work, not only providing a title but also creating a hidden message seen only by the artist and her child.
In addition to the framed pieces on the walls, there are also more than two hundred drawings spread across two sketchbooks, testament to just some of the lived research that underpins the collection. Walking in nature, working in the studio, time at home watching Netflix or playing with the children all provide inspiration, with many of the works positioning the viewer in the role of the painter-parent, looking down fondly at the child at rest, or keeping a watchful eye on the raddling of a lake with an outstretched stick. Many of the scenes speak to outdoor domesticity—there are brightly-coloured anoraks with the hoods pulled up, oversized sunhats and hands cupped to cradle a tiny seedling. There are undeniably ‘familiar’ scenes, but no less radical for it, offering snapshots of life in a non-traditional family that also invite the viewer into a small moment of rest and grateful contemplation, in a world where late-stage capitalism has made this feel like a rare and unwarranted luxury.
Rendered with the same liveliness and grace, both people and landscape act in harmony in Trow’s paintings. Here, nature is not merely the passive backdrop for human activity, but an active and loving agent in its own right, with its own quiet but powerful subjectivity. As nature writer Nan Shepherd described it, ‘substance and its essence now are one…We are love’s body, or we are undone’.[1] In the final piece of the show, a yellow flower proffered like a votive to the spectator acts as an allegory for the exhibition itself, a gift selected not just for its beauty but as a gesture of heartfelt affection.
In Walk With You, Trow has offered us many small, beautiful gestures and an invitation through her paintings: walk with them, treasure them and allow them to nourish your days.
[1] Nan Shepherd, In the Cairngorms (Edinburgh: The Moray Press, 1934)
