Curator
Part of events on ArtRabbit in: London, Penrith
b.1969 Luke M. Walker’s motivation is to capture and record the changing nature of the city. He documents his activities both on the streets and in the studio, through large scale paintings of buildings in transition that are both constructed and undone by the material fluidity of his chosen medium of paint on canvas. This has evolved into several distinct, but related bodies of work united through the ‘London Atlas’ an archive documenting a hundred mile circular walk around the city of London undertaken in 2014. 'Works in Progress' explore the nature of the building site. Through a set of processes that reflect the act of construction; moments of fluidity, interspersed with more rigorous definition and consolidation. They express the materiality, the tension and inherent danger of a building under construction, but also the energy and sense of anticipation it generates. The ‘Constructed’ series consider the notion of the skyline. An amalgamation of invention and observation, the paintings are informed in part through a walking practice. How a cityscape might be constructed through a series of framings of the sky, how buildings meet, break and contain it. They explore processes of rhythm, composition and transience. Any potential notion of stability is undermined and undone by loose, random marks that return the viewer to the material. The materials represent themselves but the paint and the painter are still present in their making. His 'Metastructure series of paintings attempt to convey the processes at work on the underground construction site for Crossrail in London. By employing 3d satellite mapping imagery, the paintings are uncertain, hesitant and unresolved, they both assimilate and estimate. They are structure, infrastructure and metastructure. Moments of clarity break down to reveal the fragility of the image and the truth of what it actually represents; a digital rendering from 400 miles above the surface of the Earth.
