Ineke van der Wal (b.1954 Netherlands) lives and works in the Southwest.
Her practise consists of paintings , drawing and writingand she has work is held in two public collections; Women' s Art Collection, Murray Edwards, Cambridge and the Collection of Southwest State University in Minnesota.

"The paintings presented here in, ‘Past un-Folding’, as the title of this exhibition
suggests, glance back not only to my own past work, but also to the portraiture of
women in Art History and her ongoing pursuit in the works in both thought and
their visual manifestations.

They are neither completely abstract nor figurative, but are suggestive of both.
Whilst the strong intense layered colours, forms and depths of the surface, with
dark and light spaces, compel one to go deeper and deeper into the painting, they
also propose a step back; to entice you to stand still, reflect and
contemplate.

 

Paintings tend to develop in series where paint and gesture diffuse in a rhythmic
and layered process in a complex interplay of memory, body, and place.
The painting process forcing the disparate elements of subject in thoughts to
exist side by side in observations in effects of light, darkness in its form .
At times fragmented and disjointed, the visuality of the work reflects and
suggests the process of coming to terms with the past and the memories of a
past which has been lost, yearned for and found again but with different kinds of
body and notion of oneself .

A consistent theme, which has been present throughout my working practise,
is not only the acknowledgment of memories in time and of places, but also
the connection, which is felt and reflected upon in an abstracted visualisation, of
the beauty of words and in particular poetry where Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare
and mostly the words of T.S. Eliot, which will never cease to inform or challenge and
cannot be easily dismissed either in their embodiment or meaning.

The Past Un-folding holds within a wistful thinking and a certain melancholy
whilst simultaneously rendering a sense of abrupt confrontation with a bodily
perception of both inner and outer .

To start over and over again....."

                                                                                                        Ineke van der Wal, 2026

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