Tira Walsh
illest

Building on her debut show at Two Rooms last year Tira Walsh continues to test herself and the viewer with her latest body of work, negotiating action in the moment with visualisation and risk taking. Working from a studio at the old Auckland Railway Station that provides her with a backdrop of gritty inner city life, Walsh is drawn to the physical intensity of manipulating marks on large scale painted surfaces.

Employing an intuitive visual language that references urban grafitti and stencilling, industrial and digital noise, and the element of chance she utilises the entire stretched canvas from back to front often working across a number of canvasses simultaneously, making decisions as she goes, both editing and layering. Then photographing a work she senses is near completion Walsh uses a drawing app on her phone to creative additional responsive marks. These are translated back into handmade marks on the canvas, leaving a trace of disruptive uncertainty around their origins. In the artist’s own words, she hopes “to give the viewer’s retina a jolt, aiming to maintain a sense of rawness in [the works’] making.”