Laurie Walker
December 8, 2011 to January 21, 2012
Please join us for the opening on Thursday, 8 December from 7 to 9 p.m
Ranging from large-scale sculptures to multimedia works, Laurie Walker’s varied practice sampled the human condition via a rich confluence of sources culled from the natural sciences and ancient mythology. Exhibited for the first time, Prometheus Rebound (2005-08), a series...
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Laurie Walker
December 8, 2011 to January 21, 2012
Please join us for the opening on Thursday, 8 December from 7 to 9 p.m
Ranging from large-scale sculptures to multimedia works, Laurie Walker’s varied practice sampled the human condition via a rich confluence of sources culled from the natural sciences and ancient mythology. Exhibited for the first time, Prometheus Rebound (2005-08), a series of large-scale works on paper, draws together some of these themes as well as more recent representations of Prometheus by Percy Bysshe Shelley and Barnett Newman in her “retelling” of the same. The four intricately rendered panels portray vast expanses of a barren glacial landscape, evoking the incorruptible images of Caspar David Friedrich. Walker’s drawings are also investigations of the sublime, that in their sequencing iterate the hubristic ambitions of Prometheus in his quest for fire. On the second floor, Walker’s Pyx (1995) continues the Prometheus myth in its evocation of alchemy and human origin. Her version of a pyx—the ornate lidded chalice used to carry and store the Eucharist, or host, in Christian traditions—has been fitted with a tiny open flame. Over it, Walker has suspended a crucible filled with a small amount of clay, which stands as a metaphor for the mythical body built from earth and alludes to the similar alchemic principles in the transubstantiation of the host.