Caroline Walls’ latest body of work, Touching From A Distance, is a meditation on
emotional intimacy and love in all its guises. This series of bold, unapologetic paintings
give voice to potent themes frequented by the artist: human connection, love and the
guarded inner psyche.

Draped, veil-like fabric is omnipresent in Walls’ paintings. This is not a tool of
concealment, but rather a stand-in for the human form, divorcing the figurative aspects
of the work from personal specificity and allowing her subjects to be perceived through
a broader concept of intimacy. Voluptuous and billowing fabric implies or reveals small
glimpses of the feminine form – the curve of a breast, the line of a bottom or hip. In other
works, the subjects of her paintings are revealed, but again these are not attached to a
specific human subject. Instead, they convey the sensations of a lived experience – a
remembered past or a fleeting moment in time. Walls’ paintings speak to the enfolded,
intertwined nature of intimacy and relationships. Striped fabric gives graphic
cartographic rhythm to Walls’ alluring emotional landscapes.

The emotional worlds constructed in Walls work are ones of female identity, female
intimacy and the dichotomy of the public and private selves. With their various degrees
of concealment and revelation, there is an implicit sensuality to her paintings. However,
this is not a performance of subjectivity, but rather something that the viewer feels to
happen upon. There is a sense of bearing witness to something hidden and
fundamentally intimate – a feeling, or a moment, that we touch from a distance.

Born in Auckland, New Zealand before moving to Australia at a young age, Walls completed an Honours degree in Visual Communication at Swinburne University of Melbourne, before spending extensive time living abroad in both London and New York, working in the field of fashion art direction and design. On returning to Australia, she completed post-graduate studies in Visual Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts and continues her art practice from her studio in Melbourne, Australia.