Frances Walker: Recent Prints and Rarities

Dr Frances Walker CBE RSA (b.1930) is our senior-most Academician. Graduating from Edinburgh College of Art in 1952, Frances’ career to date spans almost seventy-five years. For two and a half years in the early 1950’s, prior to taking up a lecturing position at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen, Frances was the sole teacher for art in Harris and North Uist. Her work since this period has engaged with places and people on the periphery. Her deep connection to Scotland, its coast and its islands, has been evident throughout her long career. However, travel to far-flung and remote areas has also brought our attention to the similarities that we, as an island nation, share with others in the more extreme north and south. Her works from Iceland, Greenland, Svalbard and Finland, and conversely from her research trip to the Antarctic at the age of 77, sit equally at home with her depictions of Orkney or her beloved Tiree.

Over her career, Frances has documented the change of land-use and the way of life in our most remote areas. From teaching on Harris prior to the arrival of electricity in homes there, to the development of industrial-scale farming; from the discovery of oil in the North Sea, to the beginnings of a transition to green energy; from the hand-to-mouth subsistence of traditional communities, to the explosion in second-home tourism on islands which some may feel to be ill-equipped for such influx. The works comment upon skills developed by generations of inhabitants who read the landscape for its possibilities and limitations for subsistence on the edges. Frances’ work makes significant comment upon this historic and contemporary land use and their fragile eco-systems, conveying the message of her concerns for advancing environmental and societal change.

The works here encompass recent prints made in her 90’s alongside examples of works which have not previously been exhibited. They range from drawings and previously unprinted etching plates made in Orkney (1981) to revisiting resource material from her frequent research trips across Scotland. A number of works also continue her fascination with the beauty of Antarctica.

Frances’ exquisite ability for the drawn line is evident across these works and her sought-after paintings and prints adorn significant museum collections and domestic spaces alike.

Colin Greenslade, RSA Director