adam j b walker

My practice explores a position on the brink of nihilism, trying to negotiate a path of making art that avoids complicity (which I acknowledge as impossible), and creates "meanings". I hope these are subjective, contextualised, embodied and multiple; not didactic, illustrative, authoritarian or structurally reaffirming.

Historically influenced by the likes of Allan Kaprow and the Situationist International, I especially seek to create or draw attention to moments (happenings..., events...) within which these meanings might be created. I look to keep things in flux and process rather than closing them down or overly resolving them.

The content of the work is rooted in the political. I expose and question my own personal, subjective experience (the only one which I can really claim to in any way "know"), but acknowledge and foreground the relationship of the work to its context. Through this my relationship to my context is highlighted and questioned, but also those of the viewer and, where applicable, the performer. I consider the ethics of all those relationships integral to the works, and each is a fine balancing act of consideration of ethics and aesthetics, neither privileging one nor the other.

The centrality of (subjective) engagement with context has been a focus over several years, however within this there has been a transition from a primarily physical framing and exploring of it, through to a more recent emphasis on the social and economic. Labour and work; the forms of value ascribed to it and to what extent it is considered meaningful or meaningless have become key focusses, especially when cross-cut with questions of class, gender, occupation, nationality and ethnicity.

Text and performance have become increasingly key means of working across this terrain.