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I paint with fire because it is the closest way to connect with nature. I light the candle, pick up my canvas and go underneath of it. The fire falls onto the canvas while I dance with my hand, like a conductor with music. I begin to see patterns that land onto the canvas and then I stop. This moment while I stop is the most important, it’s the time where I stop to look.

I use a 1937 surrealist technique popularized by Wolfgang Paalen called fumage. The technique was not invented by me. However, what makes my approach unique is that I use this technique while also letting the fire create hyper realistic images, as they did back in antiquity at the Temple of Athena with the practice of pyromancy (from Greek pyros, “fire,” and manteia, “divination”).

My latest collection focuses on the discussion between psychoanalysis and science. Uncovering the fine line that differentiates what we know and what we hope to believe. Painting with fire allows for me to use a medium that is viewed as a divination tool, yet a scientific element needed in all universal existence. I am continuing to exploration painting as a way to figure out how science and spirituality could possibly go hand and hand with expending this process of fumage with the technique of automatism.

- Tara Walters, 2017

Tara's forthcoming solo exhibition, I am listening, opens at The Red Arrow Gallery on Friday, October 13, 2017.

Tara Walters (b. Washington, DC 1990) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work encompasses painting, drawing, music, sculpture, installation art, while focusing on an unusual technique applying fire as a medium to paint with called fumage.

Walters earned her B.F.A. from Savannah College of Art and Design (2016), just after attending SCAD’s residency program in Lacoste, France. In 2012, she attended the Cloud Club residency directed by sculptor Lee Baron in Boston, MA with musician Amanda Palmer and writer Neil Gaiman.

Just before graduation in 2016, Walters exhibited in a collaboration with Stephen Knudsen at the Yale Divinity School in (Hartford, CT). After graduation in 2016, Walters showed at the Texas Contemporary Art Fair in (Houston, TX) and shortly after at Miami Project in (Miami, FL) during Art Basel. She has participated in exhibitions throughout the U.S. in Savannah, GA, Columbia, MD, Boston, MA, and internationally at various exhibitions in Lacoste, France. As well as solo exhibitions in Nashville, TN at OZ Arts Nashville, Sauvage Gallery, and the Red Arrow Gallery. Walters lives and works in Nashville, Tennessee.

* select works depicted are in progress