" ‘This Kind of Silence’ – a double screen video piece. In this work, Walsh explores the idea of looking at what lies beyond the comfort of ‘home’, out there in the dark."

"Kay Walsh arrived in Wanganui in December 2009 to undertake a three-month residency at Tylee Cottage. Wanganui-born and currently London-based, Walsh has been overseas for more than twenty years. It was never her intention that she would make London home; it just happened, as things do. The residency at Tylee Cottage allowed her to return and spend an extended period of time in her ‘home town’, Wanganui.
Walsh comments: “Ideas around states of transition and loss of ‘locatedness’ run through much of my work. Having left Wanganui more than twenty years ago to relocate abroad, I have positioned myself both geographically and emotionally at a distance from a place that remains home. Through this estranged position, a set of questions has arisen about what makes ‘home’. “Is it a state of mind, familiarity, the people, or a memory that informs my relationship to this place that I continue to call my home town?”
Having come from an inner-city environment, Walsh found picturesque Tylee Cottage on its exposed corner site a dramatic contrast. Facing the street, the cottage has something of a ‘goldfish bowl effect’, with the feeling that people are watching you as much as you are watching them. Arriving in December, Wanganui was relatively ‘vacated’ for the holiday period and rather than the constancy of noise in London, Walsh found it was replaced by silence and solitude."


Both sets of text by Greg Donson in exhibition introduction from "When time slides by slowly" 27 March – 23 May, 2010