Within Water: Millie Walton on art’s immersive potential

At a time when ‘immersive’ art is all the rage, Millie Walton dives into the serene world of Imogen Allen’s Afterglow, investigating how the poetic relationship between water and paint is still able to takeover our senses.

“I am the wave of the sea, I am the surf on the beach, the waves, the sea. I am the ripple that
breaks and disappears.”

So muses Bernard in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. He is one of six characters whose voices shape the novel’s drifting, lyrical narrative, portraying life as a series of flowing, interconnected moments. This, too, is the vision of Cornish painter Imogen Allen, whose work emerges from her deep engagement with nature. Drawing inspiration from the coastline of her home and travels further afield, she offers close-up views of the natural world – pulling us into the depths of a kelp forest, beneath the tentacles of an octopus, to the shoreline at sunset.

In these paintings, water is the connecting thread: not always as setting, nor always visible, but as a psychological state, a way of being – tied to nascence and awakening, ephemerality and the eternal. We feel its presence in the fluidity of colour and the blurring of form, a technique that requires Allen to work quickly so as to prevent the paint from fully drying before she drags a wider brush across the marks already made. There is risk in this process: it requires Allen to trust in the movements of her body but also to relinquish control, allowing the pigments to merge to varying effects. Edges are smoothed and softened, evoking the bleary-eyed sensation of looking through water or of the eyes adjusting to a shift in light and temporality. Again, we might think of Woolf and The Waves – her unspooling sentences, capturing the spill and slip of light as it moves across interior spaces and the surface of the sea.

Allen’s forms and colours are drawn from life – she works from photographs she’s taken herself or sourced online – yet the softness of her images has an otherworldly effect. Some, such as Rose Lichen (2024), Blue Beginning (2023) or Entangled Life (2024), conjure a bodily, even womb- like space. Others, like Becoming Visible (2024), suggest a ghostly figurative presence: reminders of the myriad life forms that coexist with, shape and outlast us.

There are echoes of Georgia O’Keeffe in the close cropping of her compositions, in the way microscopic organisms are visualised at a macro scale, and in her attention to folds and creases. But where O’Keeffe’s images assert themselves with bold fixedness, Allen’s hover in a state of becoming. As painted objects, they freeze time, but they also expand it, each one inviting us to descend into a deeper, slower mode of perception.

This sense of suspension – of entering a more fluid form of consciousness – calls to mind philosopher Henri Bergson’s concept of la durée, or duration: time experienced not as a sequence of moments, but as a continuous flow where past and present intermingle. In Allen’s paintings this experience of internal or lived time becomes visual. Her blurred brushwork and seamless forms collapse moments into one another, echoing the way memory and sensation bleed together. We are not merely looking at something; we are within it.

In both Bergson’s theory and Allen’s paintings, this embodied perception of time is entwined with a closeness to and respect for nature. For Allen, that intimacy began in childhood but has since expanded to reflect an interest in non-Western philosophies and practices. She recently returned from four months in Western Australia, where she spent time painting and learning about First Nations worldviews in which water is not only a material element but a living, spiritual force – a carrier of memory, a being to protect. Often aligned with feminine energy and the origin of life, water holds meaning beyond the physical.

The paintings that emerged from that period – Spirit of Alypsia (2025) and Transformation (2025) – register a shift in climate and ecosystem. Watery blues and turquoises give way to saturated reds, oranges, yellows, and ochres: colours of dry earth, searing heat and light. These changes are not merely aesthetic but reflect an expanded and relational understanding of place – attuned to local ecologies and cultural knowledge systems. Water, in these works, is not always depicted, but it is felt as rhythm, energy, and motion.

The titles of Allen’s recent paintings hint at this immersion in another landscape and its stories, but her work speaks more broadly to the spontaneous awe we feel when encountering natural phenomena, both everyday and otherworldly, ancient and fleeting. Perhaps the most familiar of these experiences, and the most photographed, is the sunset: that brief interval when the sky seems to become a painting. Magic Hour (2024) – a phrase borrowed from photography, marking the optimal moment for capturing light – makes playful reference to this temporality and its long history of visual representation but Allen’s approach avoids the desire to fix the moment. Through the movement of paint, her sunset continues to evolve so that what we see is not a depiction of the event, but the afterglow.

There is communality in this experience, in the universal language of nature, and yet Allen’s dance between form and formlessness resists any attempt to anchor her work to one place, time or narrative. Instead, her paintings invite us to enter into a space of unknowing, to fall into the fluidity of sensation.