When the Zillman Art Museum’s executive director and curator George Kinghorn first connected with artist Peter Walls about a solo exhibition, he encouraged Walls to activate the space with a suite of new works. “I’m always interested in artists who are inventive and can produce large-scale works, as well as smaller compositions,” says Kinghorn. “It’s a very ambitious project, and Peter rose to the challenge.” That ambitious project is the exhilarating Memory Palace—20 works, most of which were completed in 2024, currently installed in the museum’s newest two upper-floor galleries.

Walls is well known in both Maine and nationally for his installations in outdoor and other nontraditional art spaces, as well as for his work as a muralist and decorative painter. He moved to Maine from Vermont in 2016 and recently relocated to a new home and studio in Stockton Springs, where he, his artist wife, and his mother-in-law all have studios. Walls studied printmaking in art school. Later he moved to creating sculptures in ceramic and wood before focusing on painting.

These days, his commissioned, public, and collaborative works inform his more personal paintings, especially concerning the materials he uses. Like much of Walls’s public art, the Memory Palace paintings reject the conventional rectangular canvas, preferring edges that flow with the organic forms expressed within the picture. His painting substrates—easel-sized and life-sized (or nearly)—are shaped from high-density urethane foam that he cuts himself or with the aid of a computer numerical control (CNC) router; they are then painted in acrylic mural paints and finished with traditional mural varnishes.

The works in Memory Palace express a delight in and love for the experience of being in nature, describing seasonal ground cover, the play of light and shadow, pools of water, deep forest spaces, and the magnificent and dynamic variety of tree trunks, branches, and root systems. At the same time, they feel more imagined than “realistic” in their rendering. These are memories of places, loyal to nature but overwhelmingly about a feeling for a place, rather than a plein air impression or photograph translated into a painting. “I’m a studio artist,” Walls says, making the distinction between a landscape painter or one who works from direct observation. And while this series of work is indebted to Walls’s extensive wanderings and foraging in Maine’s wild places, it’s his camera that acts “like an imprinting” of imagery in his mind to later be reborn as painterly compositions in the studio.

The exhibition’s title refers to the mnemonic device for visualizing a familiar place and assigning aspects of that place a text, list item, or other information that needs to be recalled later. Walls brings photographs from his explorations of the natural world back to the studio, where in the predawn hours of his daily painting practice, he composes loosely with chalk and determines, as part of this initial drawing line, the shape of the whole panel. “Then I paint them, and some decisions happen quickly, and others are slower with many layers happening, and I get lost in them, in a good way. I know they’re finished when they feel quiet, when they feel like that place.”

Caretaker (Sheepscot Headwaters) and Woods and Water Alliance (Donnell Pond) are hung inches from the floor and barely clear the gallery’s ceiling. Offset from the wall, they are like doorways or portals, and their organic edges give them a sculptural effect, especially where they follow the form of a tree trunk, root, or a river stone. In three large horizontal panels, Bulwark (Schoodic Peninsula) is Walls’s largest gallery work to date, at 17 feet wide. The stunning panorama seems to shift, as if over time. It’s what it feels like to be at Schoodic through changes of light and wind and air temperature and time of day—contemplative time, when one form or phenomenon in the landscape pulls you in for a closer look, then another thing, and then something else.

“The Zillman Art Museum is a cultural resource of the University of Maine and also a major downtown Bangor attraction, uniquely focused on modern and contemporary art,” says Kinghorn. “Exhibitions are often tailored to the space, and we’re thrilled to have this new body of work of Peter’s, created for our galleries and on an immersive scale.” 

Memory Palace will be on view at the University of Maine’s Zillman Art Museum in Bangor until June 28, 2025.