“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, where form encounters feeling.

It was during her studies in Architecture at Kingston University that she felt the dual impact of learning to see creatively and selectively, and discovered the alchemy of the photographic darkroom, a moment that drew her fully into photography.

Her early work 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 conceptual art and foreshadowed her future explorations into the emotional and ephemeral qualities of the medium.

Currently working across photography, printmaking, and embroidery, she constructs layered, tactile surfaces that blur the boundaries between mediums.

Her work investigates the instability of memory and emotional residue carried within images, often through a distinctly feminine perspective. Through distortion, layering, mark-making and processes that invite chance, she creates works that exist between control and surrender, where what is seen and what is sensed begin to overlap.

Recent pieces delve into themes of presence and absence, the conscious and unconscious, revealing inner landscapes that incorporate inter-generational legacy and emotional inheritance.  Walters is drawn to processes that carry unpredictability, allowing time, material and gesture to shape the final image. “I love mediums that carry a sense of the unknown,” she says. “It’s in that space between control and surrender that the magic happens.”

Within this tension between clarity and ambiguity, her work invites quiet reflection on the complexity of the human condition.

Walters’ debut solo exhibition, Untethered was presented at The Cris Contini Gallery in London (March 2025).  She is currently studying for her Masters at The Royal College of Art.