“Take for example Alexis Walters black and white photographs from her ‘In Human Layers’ Series.  Playing with layers of the artificial from display dolls to the reflections off shop windows she frames notions of allure in relation to artifice and consumption.  These glamorous shots allude to a vacancy or perhaps expectancy present in those figures encountered in these window dressings.  Her shots frame a sense of the female as enigmatic and affirm her value only as surface (as an object to behold) as well as foregrounding the notion of femininity as performative, as a masquerade, an act that champions glamour, beauty, grace and mystery.  Alexis Walters’ colour photographs continue on the theme of person as object, but given their vividness these appear to be more authentic and present to the viewer.  However the subject matter is again the dummy.  This lends these images a somewhat kitsch and in some cases sinister quality where the other reflect a kind of sorrowful longing.  These figurations are strange caricatures: larger than life characters though distant in their mimicking unreality.”

‘Innovation in the Heart of London’ Diana Boydell. NY Arts Magazine.

Alexis Walters (b. 1978, London) is a British photographic artist whose evocative and tactile approach to image-making explores the thresholds between memory and material, form and feeling. Trained originally in Architecture at Kingston University, it was during these formative years that Walters was drawn into the alchemy of the photographic darkroom — an encounter that led her to fully immerse herself in the study and practice of photography.

Her early work, including a poignant series captured in Cuba in 2000, reflects a long-standing sensitivity to the contradictions of lived experience — the dualities of joy and struggle, resilience and fragility. These images, rich in both social resonance and visual texture, marked her debut into the art world and foreshadowed her future explorations into the emotional and ephemeral qualities of the medium.

In 2002, Walters established her own darkroom studio on Portobello Road, cultivating an independent practice that spans personal projects and commissions, including performance, portraiture, and film stills. It was here that she began to experiment with historic photographic processes such as Cyanotype and Van Dyke printing, drawn to their unpredictability and their capacity to collapse time into image.

Her recent work delves deeper into the complexities of the human form — its distortions, layers, and expressive potential — often blurring the boundaries between photography, painting, and printmaking. Walters is fascinated by the interplay between what is seen and what is sensed; her mixed-media pieces evoke a lyrical ambiguity, revealing inner landscapes as much as physical ones.

In her series Unknown, Walters invokes a haunting interplay of fading memory and veiled history, offering glimpses of moments that slip in and out of grasp. Elsewhere, in Portrait of a Life, she turns her lens toward the quiet poetry of everyday objects, transforming them into meditative studies of presence and absence through Cyanotype, ink, and paint.

Working exclusively with film, Walters embraces analogue techniques not only for their aesthetic richness but for their element of chance. “I love mediums that carry a sense of the unknown,” she says. “The precision of the camera is balanced by the unpredictability of hand-coated paper, sun-exposed images, and painting with light in the dark. It’s in that space between control and surrender that the magic happens.”

Walters continues to develop her personal artistic practice while remaining open to selected commissions, working between the studio and location with the same contemplative rigor that defines all of her work.