Blood

Mark Walker

 

Mark Walker is a Nottingham born artist, currently based in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He has a MFA from Oslo National Academy of the Arts and a Meisterschüle from the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, where he studied Sculpture under Prof.Tobias Rehberger, and a BA in Painting from Camberwell College of Arts, UAL.

Past exhibitions include; Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2010, at the ICA, London and A-Foundation, Liverpool. Pashmina at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt. ÜBERMORGENKÜNSTLER, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, nnausea, PRETEXTO, Pasto, Colombia. And most recently; Valume at EXGIRLFRIEND gallery, Berlin, Vårutstillingen at Foto Galleriet, Oslo, Norway and Free education for all, It’s not too late to change your mind at Kunstnernes Hus Oslo, Norway.

 

Mark's current project, 'Dirt and Sweeping', explores the friction between a time of regulation, the temporal discipline inherited from working-class rhythms, and another time which allows for duration, for the kind of personal experience of time that refuses reduction to units. This tension has become the working ground. Extended temporalities emerge through preservation, through repetition, through sculptural works that wait for activation. Repetition and cycles have become part of his visual language with progression, neither linear nor circular, but cyclical, moving toward something, yet never quite reaching it. The spiral embodies this paradox.

 

Mark is currently exploring drawing spiralling helixes, using technical drafting techniques. Before employing these methods, Mark's drawings of spirals were always just bad squiggles, easier to understand in 3D. He wanted to visualise the helixes in 2D without building anything. Discovering the technical drawing technique enabled me to do this, yet the process itself became fascinating, and the path of following it has led into geometry. A geometry that relates to the division of clock faces, and movements of planets. He has pushed the technique into a process that has steadily grown more chaotic, systematically breaking away from the easily divisible numbers to explore interlocking wavelengths of different frequencies.

 

 

A Geometry of Drift

 

I want to start this text with the statement that I'm making these works at the most directionless, lost time I've ever felt in my life. With these drawings also feel lost. I don't know why I am following this path down into these mathematical patterns, escaping into a system I am making more and more disordered. Being open with this might also help with my next steps. 


It is through dialogue with Kerry and Benjamin that my position and aspects of the work have been brought into focus. Benjamin has shared stories of his upbringing and background that he is working through here in this exhibition. He has been encouraging me to tackle my background, too. My understanding of my working-class background, Benjamin has been very honest in explaining his, and how different his is to mine, which doesn't meet the commonly assumed stereotypes. And Kerry, who shares her position, much more like mine, of not feeling a belonging in this class or that, a suspension between, where falling is most likely. 


Kerry has generously shared her knowledge of the metaphysics of time, as that is what she is a doctor of. These discussions with her helped/pushed me to find a path and keep evaluating the relationship between clock and background.

 

My artworks are generally process-driven, and I am drawn to using machines, tools and techniques related to tradition, production and industry. Often with repetition, and with these tools, my hands and the amount of time it takes to make, I become encased in an industrialised clock time. The time I was indoctrinated into, that you work these hours, sleep these, and you better rest in the other few.

 

With these drawings, I am using techniques from drawing manuals to understand how to render spirals/helixes in 2D, and because of this geometry, understanding clock faces better, in relation to the failed introduction of decimal time during the French Revolution.


They have perhaps helped keep me lost, as I have worked through them to move away from an ordered rhythm, altering the numbers to avoid pattern, sticking with the drawings, to find what emerges. Instead of dividing circles by 360 degrees, I try 358, 382, 366. Instead of 12 points for a wavelength, use 10, 16, 26. The geometry shifts, the system broken just enough to stop the patterns repeating.


Multiple helixes with different wavelengths crash into each other, sometimes appearing to weave, something that would be impossible in three dimensions but work on paper.

The choice of numbers becomes the investigation, the choice of how we have made reality with the numbers we have chosen to use...

 

The numbers go in, the drafting is laboured over, the result is some flowing helixes. Some tubes that swirl and weave, behind every flowing line lies careful calculation, plotting circles on grids to find their tangling. Driving this forward is with optimism that lines create understanding, meaning.


My Sanguine energy - action always checked by laboured reflection, spontaneous gestures that must be questioned before they're worth following.


The latest drawings achieve their own confusion, no clear patterns visible, which seems exactly right. They reflect the state of being between positions, always doubting, always spiralling toward centres they never reach, embodying the friction between felt time and measured time, between industrialised rhythms and artistic process. The patterns lead nowhere except into their own spiral logic, which may be exactly where I need to go.

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