Agnes Walden is a teacher, but her paintings won’t teach you a thing. She speaks lucidly about painting with the off-the-cuff exactitude of an expert, but her paintings are inscrutable.

That is unless you linger, wait, and put in a little work. Then, you haven’t been taught something by her — you’ve taught yourself. Walden will supply the art; the interpretation is on you. Or, as she puts it, “I want the viewer to have to cut into their food.”

Walden’s paintings are like Rorschach tests. Figures aren’t depicted; they emerge slowly. Background becomes foreground. Different viewers see very different things.

In Walden’s Fragment of a Plan for a Fountain, a woman, her hair cascading down and her breasts erect, leans against the rim of a pool of water. Look closer, and she’s not the only one; there are one, two, three, four more women. They lean and stretch and balance on one foot. Each one seems simultaneously to be up to no good and to be doing nothing much at all.

Return to the main figure: from her mouth, she spits a stream of water into a tub. Through another orifice she takes in water from the same tub she spits into. “She’s bottoming water,” Walden says.

The painting’s title tells us that what we’re looking at is a blueprint. The women, painted the color of mossy stone, are statuesque. As you look, you realize that their bodies are the pillars that hold the fountain in place. And the central figure, water cycling through her, is the ouroboros that keeps the whole thing running.

Walden is one of this year’s visual arts fellows at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. The distinction between the human and the constructed is often impossible to parse in her paintings. “I’m really interested in the ways a person is made of their environment and vice versa,” she says. She means this both metaphorically and literally. In her paintings, the figures in the foreground are constituted by the darker pigments used for the background. They come into being through all that is not them. They are their environment.

The main woman in Fragment of a Plan for a Fountain has a penis — a fact the painting seems to take for granted. In this Rorschach test, it’s the one thing that doesn’t slowly emerge. From the very beginning, it’s just there.

Walden has taught art at the Dalton School in New York City and the Rhode Island School of Design, from which she graduated with an M.F.A. in painting in 2020 — but her paintings offer no easy lessons.

“Trans women are often used as ciphers to explain gender,” she says. “I don’t see many images of trans women that aren’t instrumentalized toward some end. Sometimes these images are used to teach good ‘liberal’ values.” Walden makes scare quotes with her fingers. She pauses. “Sometimes, it’s more sinister than that.”

She grabs a book off a stool in her studio, where it was precariously balanced on top of a pile of artist monographs by Alice Neel, Marlene Dumas, and others. It’s a weathered copy of the trans studies scholar Emma Heaney’s book The New Woman: The Trans Feminine Allegory. Every page is heavily marked up with Walden’s annotations in purple crayon. Heaney argues in the book that the trans woman “holds explanatory power regarding the sex and sexuality of cis people.” As such, when she’s represented, it’s never to evince her own subjectivity but as a teaching tool, an allegory. Heaney writes, “Trans women’s very existence is always forced to mean something outside itself.”

Walden’s art opens a new frontier that takes transness not as a monolithic subject that can provide simple answers to complex questions but as a diverse field that refuses to provide any answers at all — that, like the process of viewing Walden’s paintings, revels in unabating flux.

Walden was born and reared in Minneapolis. Her parents are Catholic, and she grew up attending church on Sundays. During Mass, she would imagine that her eyes were lasers and that the church was full of mirrors. She would try to figure out how the lasers would refract through the mirrors and bounce around the church. She was determined to come up with a way to get the imaginary lasers to beam onto Jesus crucified above the altar.

“I didn’t do much visual art as a kid,” she says, “but I did have this budding sense of spatial awareness.”

Walden attended Colorado College, where she majored in art after an early interest in cartooning transformed into a desire to paint.

“I love Adventure Time and SpongeBob SquarePants,” she says. Her painting professor was coincidentally a devout Catholic, and the curriculum reflected this. “I didn’t learn anything about contemporary art,” says Walden, “just old-school painters.” Her upbringing and education have left traces in her work, which feels both fresh and archaic, like a just-cleaned cathedral.

After college, Walden moved to Chicago, where she sold cheese at a farmers market. After RISD, she moved to New York City, where she lived before arriving at FAWC in October.

She spends her mornings in Provincetown walking around and reading and then paints through the afternoon until sunset, when she heads to the ocean. “In my studio, I’m looking at close-up surfaces all day,” she says. “So, it’s important to spend some time looking at things that are far away, to feel an expanse.”

She says her work has changed drastically in her six months at FAWC. “I think my paintings have gotten uglier. I wanted them to be less French,” she says, “and more medieval.”

The paintings are not ugly, but there is something brutal about them. Before FAWC, she painted mostly portraits of live figures — “paintings that are full of love,” she says. “But the way portraiture circulates is all like, ‘Look at these precious people.’ I wanted to arrive at a different mode of addressing the viewer, one that is more of a cryptic confrontation.”

Loveliness and confrontation meet in an unusual marriage in Walden’s huge painting Splitting Fossils. The work is both cheery and barbaric, painted in a vermilion so intense it seems to be emitting its own light. But that vermilion also sometimes deepens into crimson and, as the figure emerges, it becomes hard to tell if we’re looking at tresses of her wavy hair or blood dripping from a wound in her head.

Walden’s work is full of bruises, lacerations, sutures, and all kinds of carnage. Often in the paintings, these wounds are just barely stitched back together with a loosely tied thin ribbon.

Her upcoming show in a group showcase at FAWC with visual arts fellow Tinja Ruusuvuori and writing fellows Molly Anders and David Hutcheson is titled “Poultice,” an herbal remedy applied to a festering wound. “Kind of like paint,” Walden says.

Cut Into Your Food

The event: A showcase with fellows Molly Anders, David Hutcheson, Tinja Ruusuvuori, and Agnes Walden
The time: Friday, April 5, 5 to 8 p.m.
The place: Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St., Provincetown
The cost: Free