:::: Adam Walker,(June 2012) ::::
Adam Walker, 23 by 21.5, 2012, Pigment on canvas, 115cm x 120cm, (Photograph: Adam Walker)
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Adam Walker, 12.5 by 62, 2012, Pigment on canvas, 100cm x 200cm, (Photograph: Adam Walker)
Adam Walker, Malevich, 2011, Mixed media
200cm x 100cm x 200 cm,
(Photograph: Pangolin London / Steve Russell)
Adam Walker, Cell, 2010, Mixed media, 50cm x 50cm x 50cm, (Photograph: Adam Walker)
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Adam Walker, Packet RY, 2010, Mixed media, 200cm x 250cm x 30cm, (Photograph: Adam Walker)
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Adam Walker, Packet RY, 2010, (detail), Mixed media,
200cm, 250cm x 30cm, (Photograph: Adam Walker)
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Adam Walker, Memorial to the Grand Surrey Canal, 2011, Mixed media, 300cm x 500cm x 300cm, (Photograph: Dom Ridout)
Adam Walker, Memorial to the Grand Surrey Canal, 2011, (detail), Mixed media, 300cm x 500cm x 300 cm, (Photograph: Dom Ridout)
Interview with Adam Walker conducted via email, (April 2012):
(See end of interview for artist links)
A Submersible: Could you tell me where your at with your thinking about your Memorial to the Tooting Watchtower and Memorial to the Metropolitan Meat Market proposals.
Have you had any more thoughts on them? Have there been any developments since your journal entry on the subject?[adamwalkerart.tumblr.com/artistsjournal (February 3 2012 entry)]
Adam Walker: The proposals for those two works are still on the drawing board and things I'd like to do.
I think the Metropolitan Meat Market is unfortunately unlikely to happen, in it's original form at least. I developed the proposal for a commission which had quite significant funding and involved running a series of workshops with local school children (in which they would create the 'hides'), but I didn't get it unfortunately.
The Tooting work is still something I'm hoping to be able to realise soon. There's a new project space / gallery down there who I've been speaking to about the feasibility of making it, so I'm hoping it might come about sometime in the next couple of months.
I've also been speaking to a gallery on Millbank about creating a Memorial to Millbank Prison, which would involve a constricting maze of cells through which viewers would negotiate a path, at the end of which they would find themselves in front of a bank of monitors showing time lapsed hidden camera footage of the journey they had just made, a contemporary referencing of the 'Panopticon' concept that was pioneered in the prison whereby the behaviour of prisoners was controlled by the constant possibility of being observed. The observers position was obscured in a kind of hide so the prisoners didn't know if they were being watched or not, so behaved as if they were all the time. Did you know Britain has the densest coverage of CCTV cameras of anywhere in the world?
Making work like the three pieces described above is a bit of a logistical challenge, essentially because there are not insignificant costs involved in materials, construction and transportation, and they're too big to store. So the challenge is persuading someone to commission it or at least commit to displaying it when they've only seen plans on paper. That then brings about a secondary problem of a tendency to start trying to propose work to fit the brief, which might start to pull your practice away from it's central focus. I think it's fine to tailor your work to specific contexts, but if it doesn't fit within your own principal areas of concern and exploration then it might fall apart a bit conceptually, or you might end up making something that you wouldn't want to stand behind a few years later.
The further difficulty with these works of course is that they're all about site specificity, it's hardly as if I can go and make them anywhere. I'm going to be doing some collaborative projects up at Camden Arts Centre over the coming months, so thank you for asking about these works - they've been on the back burner outside of the forefront of my thinking but I might look into seeing if something similar could be feasible up there. One of the joys of London is that pretty much everywhere has a wealth of history. I will of course have to be wary of the potential problems outlined in the paragraph above though.
A S: Thanks, it's interesting to hear about how you approach things and the ideas you have, regardless of what becomes of them.
On what you loosely call your Memorial series, you said you see it as a development rather than a departure from the concerns of your practice. So I thought I'd ask you a bit about this. Looking at photographs of your previous works such as Packet RY, Cell and Malevich, there is a clear sense of the progression of processes that you have expressed an interest in. I suppose in a sense they have a "performative" aspect which the viewer misses and arrives to be greeted only by the aftermath. To me at least, this would seem to allow the work to lead as you say, "to a sense of loss, memory and memorialization of an earlier state".
Adam Walker, Packet RY, 2010, Mixed media, 200cm x 250cm x 30cm, (Photograph: Adam Walker)
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Adam Walker, Cell, 2010, Mixed media, 50cm x 50cm x 50cm, (Photograph: Adam Walker)
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Adam Walker, Malevich, 2011, Mixed media
200cm x 100cm x 200 cm,
(Photograph: Pangolin London / Steve Russell)
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It seems that in your Memorial to the Grand Surrey Canal and your two proposals Memorial to the Tooting Watchtower and Memorial to Millbank Prison as your currently considering them, the sense of a memorial would still loom large. However, there would not seem to be the same missed performative aspect as in your earlier works. It seems that rather than being outside it the viewer might be more bound up in the process, a process of seeing the work and feeling a connection between their current location as it is and as it was somehow.
Furthermore you've mentioned that for Memorial to the Tooting Watchtower and Memorial to Millbank Prison, the spectator may be activated by possibly climbing a watch tower and navigating some sort of maze respectively. It would seem this would further position the subject within a process rather than outside it, as with your previous works, thus diminishing any sense of aftermath.
Furthermore you've mentioned that for Memorial to the Tooting Watchtower and Memorial to Millbank Prison, the spectator may be activated by possibly climbing a watch tower and navigating some sort of maze respectively. It would seem this would further position the subject within a process rather than outside it, as with your previous works, thus diminishing any sense of aftermath.
Adam Walker, Memorial to the Grand Surrey Canal, 2011, Mixed media, 300cm x 500cm x 300cm, (Photograph: Dom Ridout)
As such perhaps your aiming to articulate ideas of loss, memory and memorialization in a different way? I know you don't like the idea of creating an authoritative way for your work to be seen. However from your perspective at least, I was wondering to what, if any extent you see your practice and its development in these terms?
A W: Yes, I agree with what you say. There isn't the same sense of aftermath of a performance in the Memorial works as there was in some of the previous ones.
It's interesting reading your take on this. Although I agree completely I hadn't actually stopped to reflect on it. I, for me at least, that's the way my practice tends to develop. Yes, there are conscious decisions in new directions in the work, but often the retrospectively more significant changes in direction will be something that only becomes apparent looking back rather than something I've set I out to do.
A W: Yes, I agree with what you say. There isn't the same sense of aftermath of a performance in the Memorial works as there was in some of the previous ones.
It's interesting reading your take on this. Although I agree completely I hadn't actually stopped to reflect on it. I, for me at least, that's the way my practice tends to develop. Yes, there are conscious decisions in new directions in the work, but often the retrospectively more significant changes in direction will be something that only becomes apparent looking back rather than something I've set I out to do.
Adam Walker, 23 by 21.5, 2012, Pigment on canvas, 115cm x 120cm, (Photograph: Adam Walker)
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Adam Walker, 12.5 by 62, 2012, Pigment on canvas, 100cm x 200cm, (Photograph: Adam Walker)
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The most recent works I'm making (12.5 by 62 etc.) don't have such a visceral performative aspect to them either, though there is perhaps a bit of that in the soaking canvasses in suspensions of pigment. These works are more about the memorialisation of something (a geometric shape, though that could be interpreted in a more expansive way) wholly hypothetically which has never actually existed anywhere outside my mind. The ones I've made thus far depict flat 2 dimensional presences on the wall, but where it's heading now is back into three dimensions - showing the lines the pigment has reached on the sides as well as the front of the canvases describes a flat plane which can be interpreted as continuing out indefinitely, and combining several of these planes in a room can start to map out a 3 dimensional 'object' within it.
Going back to the earlier works, I've long been interested in the way the viewer has to negotiate a path in and around the artwork and get different perspectives on it (Phyllida Barlow is a huge influence in this if you know her work). This obviously plays out much more in three dimensional works than those on the wall, but even on the wall I'm interested in making the viewer look at the edges and even the back of things. With these new works mapping out these hypothetical objects, as the viewer gradually pieces together the shape being described they could even come to the possibly uncomfortable realisation that they are 'within' the shape. As you've no doubt realised it's the area between painting and sculpture that interests me, so the way these new works might explore that area further really excites me.
Coming back to the Memorials then - Yes I think you're right, the viewer is brought more fully in the process of the work, the performative aspect has shifted to later. But I think that's perhaps best thought of as a development of this idea of the way they have to negotiate a path in and around the work.
Like I said when we met up I think, my work tends to swing in one direction then another, so I have no doubt that presenting the aftermath of a very visceral performance is something that I will return to.
A S: Okay, thanks very much for speaking with me Adam
Links:
www.adamwalkerart.co.uk
Going back to the earlier works, I've long been interested in the way the viewer has to negotiate a path in and around the artwork and get different perspectives on it (Phyllida Barlow is a huge influence in this if you know her work). This obviously plays out much more in three dimensional works than those on the wall, but even on the wall I'm interested in making the viewer look at the edges and even the back of things. With these new works mapping out these hypothetical objects, as the viewer gradually pieces together the shape being described they could even come to the possibly uncomfortable realisation that they are 'within' the shape. As you've no doubt realised it's the area between painting and sculpture that interests me, so the way these new works might explore that area further really excites me.
Coming back to the Memorials then - Yes I think you're right, the viewer is brought more fully in the process of the work, the performative aspect has shifted to later. But I think that's perhaps best thought of as a development of this idea of the way they have to negotiate a path in and around the work.
Like I said when we met up I think, my work tends to swing in one direction then another, so I have no doubt that presenting the aftermath of a very visceral performance is something that I will return to.
A S: Okay, thanks very much for speaking with me Adam
Links:
www.adamwalkerart.co.uk