Marianne Walker
Hand of a Changeling, graphite pencil on sculpted paper-clay (2020)
Marianne Walker was born in Yorkshire UK 1970, lives and works in London. Her MA graduation exhibition of a pencil drawn installation called Evident at Wimbledon School of Art earned her a new British artist award from the Observer Magazine in 2002.
Marianne Walker's practice sits right on the cusp between drawing and sculpture. She uses paper-clay to make fragmentary body parts that are then drawn on using ink and pencil. Her three-dimensional drawings are a material conversation with the archaeological
remains of the past metabolised through the present with a nod to the future.
Passionate about the doing, making and experiencing of drawing, Marianne's ongoing commitment to this practice has it's foundation in the highly agentive and accessible character of this medium. Her objective in drawing across the surface of her sculpted forms is to escape the rectangular page and push the two-dimensional medium into becoming a three-dimensional entity that can confront a viewer. She approaches drawing as an act of enlivening and manifestation. In the process of making the pencil or ink knits together with the language of the form to become a hybrid object that hovers between both disciplines.
Marianne is the current recipient of the East Yorkshire Spotlight on the Arts Commission, an Arts Council funded commission to bring contemporary art to new audiences, and is developing new works for installation at Sewerby Hall, East Yorkshire in 2022.
Selected Exhibitions
Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, Reclaiming Magic, Royal Academy, London (2021)
Wells Art Contemporary Installations, Wells, (2021)
Plymouth Contemporary, Plymouth, (2021)
The Flesh of Thought, Blyth Gallery, Imperial College (2019)
Neo: Art Prize, Bolton Museum and Art Gallery (2019)
Artworks Open, Barbican Arts Group Trust, selected by Tai Shani and Emma Talbot, London (2018)
Contemporary British Drawing, Xi'an Academy of Fine Art, China (2015)
Alchemical Reactions, Cafe Oto, London (2011)
Orion's Shorts Film Festival, a High Desert Test Sites exhibition, Californian desert (2006)
Romantic Detachment, a Grizedale Arts exhibition, PS1 MoMA,
New York (2004)
Jerwood Drawing Prize, London (2002)
Selected Residencies
Radical Residency V at Unit 1 Gallery Workshop (2020)
The CoLaB Body and Place Historic Residency (2019)
L' AIR Arts Drawing Research Residency in Paris supported by a European Cultural Foundation travel grant (2019)
Pharaonic Beard, graphite pencil on sculpted paper-clay (2019)
Mask of an Old God , graphite pencil on sculpted paper-clay (2019)
Time At Hogchester Arts
I'm still metabolising my residency at Hogchester Arts in July this year. It made a big impact on me and the ripples are still moving outward.
My practice is very much research based and I fully expected to be searching out the fossils and museums in the locality during my time there but that's not what happened. I stayed in the yurt and this thinned my city skin. I found that I wanted to pay attention to the non-human life so abundant at Hogchester.
The things that I brought away with me are a memory of an adult and juvenile red kite gracefully circling a copse of trees while the smaller birds hiding within cried out in alarm, the huffing of horses outside my door, the rain at night pounding on the roof of the yurt, the intelligent goats looking back at me. One very memorable trip was made to Hell Lane, an enchanted place filled with the agency of vernacular carvers.
My time at Hogchester has led to a deeper understanding of the animistic and agentive aspects of my practice that will no doubt be continuing to manifest in the months to come.
