Ferrous Ghosts: Joe Warrior-Walker

Fred Levine is pleased to present Ferrous Ghosts, a new series of paintings by artist Joe Warrior-Walker. Opening on 19 June 2026, the exhibition brings together works that occupy a space between the material and the ethereal, paintings concerned with what persists, what recedes, and what leaves its presence in the residue of memory.

Warrior-Walker's paintings bear the physical imprint of previous layers; half-erased, sanded, or softened into transparency. These residual marks act as afterimages: ghosts of what was once fully visible. Through a process of scraping, rebuilding and selective effacement. The paintings are rooted in the language of landscape without depicting any singular location. The compositions are psychological topographies - terrain that captures the way a place lingers within the subconscious, fading into the periphery and occasionally emerging back into clarity.

Combining a mixture of mediums, including raw pigments derived from oxidised metal. Etched lines and thin washes transition between something ethereal and remembered. Each composition becomes a terrain. Rather than a fixed representation, the images encapsulate a collage of environments experienced, past and present, deliberately held in a state of flux resisting resolution. 

The exhibition's title draws from ‘Ferrous’ referring to the presence of iron: the material of the earth, the oxidised pigment on the picture surface and the structural skeleton of environments both built and natural. Before iron was extracted from ore, it was first recovered from fallen meteorites. The ancient Egyptians knew it as ba-en-pet - the metal of heaven. In Mesopotamia it was called an-bar: celestial metal or star-metal, because it literally fell from the sky, iron was understood as a sacred material, a gift from the heavens. Tutankhamun was buried with a ceremonial dagger forged from meteoric iron, its divine origin ensuring its ritual power. For millennia before smelting was discovered, this sky-born metal occupied a unique position: simultaneously of the earth and beyond it.

The second term, Ghosts, names the memory of place: the remnants of previous layers, the ethereal space left behind. In the folklore of Britain and Ireland, iron and spirits have long been entwined in a relationship of binding and repulsion. 'Cold iron' was believed to repel malevolent presences; iron horseshoes were nailed above thresholds to ward off evil, while cemetery fences of iron were raised to contain the souls of the dead. Yet iron could also be used to hold a spirit in place: at burial, iron objects were driven into coffins and grave sites to anchor a restless or feared soul to the earth, preventing it from rising to trouble the living. The metal at once expelled and imprisoned, protected and constrained, a paradox that mirrors the tension in Warrior-Walker's own surfaces, where marks are simultaneously preserved and obscured.

In Ferrous Ghosts, Warrior-Walker positions his paintings at the threshold between worlds. The iron pigment on the canvas is not merely a material choice but a philosophical one - it connects the work to the earth, to the sky, to the long human history of a substance that was considered holy precisely because its origins were mysterious and remote. The ghostly residue of earlier marks, meanwhile, refuses to disappear entirely. Memory, like iron, endures, not entirely visible, but impossible to fully erase.