New South Wales-based artist Meg Walters is exhibiting a body of work titled The Ecstasy of Dying and the Vastness of Living at Florence’s Beast Gallery starting October 1. We speak to the oil painter ahead of the vernissage, which will also serve as a launch event for this issue of The Florentine.
For Walters, the journey back to Italy has been a long one. She first came to the country at 18, backpacking, sleeping in train stations and surviving on day-old bread and two-euro bottles of wine. “I just fell in love with Italy,” she recalls. “There’s something so romantic about this place. It has staying power and longevity.”
The Australian artist has lived a peripatetic life, growing up largely in Bermuda and Canada, studying in the UK and eventually settling in Australia 18 years ago, where she met her husband. For around a decade, she worked in the music industry, on the creative strategy side of record labels, helping emerging artists establish their careers. It was only when she turned 30, had her first child and moved with her family from the city to the jungle outside Byron Bay in northern New South Wales that she returned seriously to painting.
“I knew I couldn’t continue to work 80 hours in the music industry,” she says. “And when you have a child, you radically redirect your thinking and perspective on pretty much everything in your life. I thought, what do I want to do? The answer was still art.”
Eight years on, Walters describes herself as fortunate to have built a career from something she once found daunting. The intervening years, she believes, gave her the experience and resilience to approach art with a stronger sense of what she wanted to say.
Her paintings emerge from what she calls a “methodical excavation of ideas”. Inspiration is rarely in short supply; the challenge is allowing ideas to develop. “I have too many ideas and I really have to consolidate them or find ways to let them percolate,” she explains. Some ideas disappear, while others evolve into bodies of work that can occupy her for long periods of time.
For the Florence exhibition, those ideas converge around water. Every landscape in The Ecstasy of Dying and the Vastness of Living is based around a body of water, which Walters sees as a life force running through the work. The exhibition explores the bittersweet awareness of mortality and how it can intensify an appreciation of being alive. “When you’re confronted with your own mortality, life becomes a bit sweeter. You’re suddenly able to actually be present in that moment and enjoy it.”
Her landscapes are similarly fluid. Having lived across several countries, Walters says place has never felt static or fixed. Rather than depicting specific locations, she combines memories and sketches from different places, filling in the gaps through imagination. “None of my landscapes are actually landscapes,” she says. “They’re real amalgamations of various places that I’ve lived.”
The Florence exhibition grew from a meeting with Beast Gallery founders Jan Blusseau and Anna Bowcock almost two years ago. Returning to Italy after more than two decades has inevitably fed into the work, bringing hazy memories of her first encounter with the country into her creative process. “I think it all just kind of folds into the mix for me.”
The exhibition comprises oil paintings on linen, alongside three smaller works made with oil on aluminium board, in another chapter in Walters’ ongoing excavation of memory, place and the fleeting nature of life.
The Florentine October: The Exhibition Issue Launch at the Meg Walters vernissage at Beast Gallery
To mark the launch of our October Exhibition Issue, join us for the vernissage of Australia-based artist Meg Walters at Beast Gallery (via di Mezzo 40A). Includes a live interview of the artist.
October 1, 2026
6-8pm
Free event
RSVP: press@theflorentine.net
