Mark Walker

Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Artist statement

The recent body of work, Sketches for the spiral wanderer, consists of drawings that employ a rigorous structure of helix forms, to convey the significance of manual labour. Viewers experience this through accumulations of faint, gridded lines, which I use to manually plot the helix forms, with help from a custom-made protractor. These drawings were themselves preceded by a series of sculptures, which articulated similar forms with razor blades and coins. The spiral form recurs across my work, in different articulations, like an overdetermined motif — a poetic intervention against the fantasy of linear time. The same recurrence appears in my photography and writing. My photography is an analog, medium-format practice: it began with dehydrating vegetables and photographing them in landscape-inspired still lifes, then pseudo-solarising film and paper in developing — double pseudo-solarisation — for a dreamlike, black-and-white quality. I have recently taken this process to the Atacama Desert in Chile, where the dryness itself speaks to a form of preservation, and so to time. My writing is short form, coming from experience — compiled notes or a letter, not essay or story. In the desert, it took the form of a letter about disappearing into it, moving in a spiral around it, until I dehydrate. My rationale for working in this slow and labour-intensive fashion reflects a belief in the importance of manual, cognitively and physically-embedded problem-solving. My drawings,...

Artwork