Romily Alice Walden views art as an act of rebellion. It’s a defiant stance against how society defines women’s roles and their bodies. 

Combining neon, fabric, and video, Walden studies the emotional architecture behind connection: the performance of identity and desire in global matchmaking cultures — a phenomenon that spans from online dating to mail-order brides.

The Language of Visibility

At the center of her work is language: the body language, the verbal language, and coded expressions that turn sexuality into a consumable commodity. 

By confronting this topic directly, Romily exposes how one’s appearance can turn entire lives and decisions into a stereotype. She examines women’s autonomy, migration, and digital self-representation by questioning what happens when a personal search for love is translated into a marketable narrative.

In Walden’s hands, art is a study in perception: how the past carries stories of power and misunderstanding, and how women continue to reclaim those terms as they write new versions of themselves.

Material and Form

Her work is full of pale neon lights displaying fragments of text: online introductions, short letters, gestures of self-definition. Some lines are hopeful, others guarded. Their gentle glow contrasts with the sharpness of their phrasing, capturing the tension between sincerity and strategy that shapes modern dating culture.

On screen, women appear in quiet, domestic actions: folding clothes, arranging a table, checking a reflection in the glass. Each gesture repeats until it shifts from private to performative. Walden films these routines in natural light, refusing glamour or sentimentality. What emerges is a sense of persistence — women shaping their days, their environments, and their futures with patience and intention.

Walden’s work neither mocks nor defends the women whose choices fall under public scrutiny. Instead, she studies how external narratives attach themselves to women’s actions: whether when they seek love on the street or through mail-order bride sites

In this sense, she doesn’t depict women from any specific geography or demographic. It presents emotional archetypes — women writing, waiting, translating, adjusting — each performing the quiet labor of self-making. Walden connects these figures to broader histories of female migration, care work, digital intimacy, and how all share a common thread: the need to narrate oneself before being narrated by others.

There are no portraits, no moral verdicts. The work instead slows down the pace by creating discussion on how easily a woman’s decision to cross a border, literal or emotional, can be simplified into a single word.

The Psychology of Presentation

Across Walden’s practice, the question of how one is seen recurs as both psychological and political. In earlier works like My Body is the House that I Live In (2018), she traced how pain and visibility intersect in disabled experience. In Always Turned On (2021), she studied the exhaustion of continuous self-display online.

In this framework, the figure is not a character but a reflection of a global condition: the way women monetize affection and turn individual difference into spectacle. Walden uses that figure to think about performance — what it takes to present oneself as desirable, legible, and safe within structures that expect compliance but reward charisma.

Material Empathy and Digital Care

The work’s physical textures convey the emotional content they carry. Neon and silicone are materials of both exposure and protection: bright yet fragile, soft yet durable. Walden arranges them in ways that focus on the contradictory states of online connection where trendy dating apps and sites with mail-order brides both share the same place — public yet intimate, global yet deeply personal.

Throughout her exhibitions, the artist introduces subtle references to care. Cushions resemble support devices; audio cables resemble veins. These details tie back to Walden’s interest in the body as both vulnerable and political. She connects the emotional labor of women in global matchmaking to her own lived experience as a queer, disabled artist. In both contexts, care is a method of endurance.

Language as Terrain

Rather than avoiding contested terms, Walden reclaims them as material to define women — hysterical, spinster, exotic. The exhibition treats such words as objects to be dissected and reassembled, exposing the histories embedded within them.

This linguistic approach also reflects a broader theme of translation. Many of the works use overlapping text in different languages, sometimes mistranslated or intentionally misaligned. The result is a visual rhythm that mimics online communication: partial understanding, emotional improvisation, and the constant need to clarify meaning.

By situating these gestures within an art space, Walden turns the act of self-introduction into something communal. Each phrase of neon light becomes both confession and resistance — evidence of a woman defining herself on her own terms, even within borrowed language.

The Politics of Choice

Romily Alice is focused on the right to choose one’s path, and the psychological negotiation that follows. Whether through a dating app, a relocation, or a cross-border relationship as a mail-order bride, Walden portrays women who make deliberate decisions about their futures — decisions that often carry the weight of scrutiny.

Women’s choices can’t be reduced to economics or desperation, just as they can’t be idealized as liberation. Between those poles lies a reality of emotional labor, adaptation, and agency — the work of defining oneself in a community that’s eager to define you first.

There is no spectacle here, no easy catharsis. The works operate through patience, repetition, and empathy. Visitors move through dim light and soft sound, encountering words that appear and disappear at the edge of readability. The experience encourages attention rather than reaction by echoing one central idea: to see clearly, one must slow down.

Through this restraint, Walden creates a space for rethinking how women’s lives are narrated — not only those labeled as mail-order brides, but all women who manage the tension between visibility and self-possession.

About the Artist

Romily Alice Walden is a transdisciplinary artist based in Berlin and London. Her work centers on manifestation and its relationship to gender and power in contemporary culture. As a queer, disabled artist, she approaches the politics of looking and being looked at through personal and collective lenses, linking care, control, and representation across contexts.

A fellow at UdK Graduate School, she has exhibited at SOHO20 Gallery (2019) and the National Gallery of Australia (2020).