JuliaN Walker

Julian Walker

City Stressed 01

Wood engraving print

City Stressed 03

Wood engraving print

City Stressed 4

Wood engraving print

These works were made during and as a response to lockdown, particularly the avoidance of touch in the density of the city. These are wood engravings, a technique of printmaking that allows very fine details. After working for many years with grid patterns, in these works I have abandoned regularity to explore what happens when regular pathways are disrupted by the need to avoid touching. Objects and paths appear to recoil from each other, crossings are prevented and clear sightlines come to ends.

The wood engraving technique proposes a close working method – they are often made with the aid of a magnifying glass. I have very short sight and I use this to allow very close working unaided, but I am aware that this means that the works have to be looked at either very close up, or enlarged. However, enlarging them takes away from their almost microscopic quality. The need to physically be close in order to see the composition creates a situation where the image fills the vision. This points to the paradox of the miniature, noted by Susan Stewart in 'On Longing', that the miniature becomes a portal to a space where everything retains its own size. In this case the spaces between objects carry an importance beyond their apparent size. What at first looks like a jumble of shapes and lines becomes on closer inspection an elaborate set of movements of avoidance, almost a dance or a vibration, often mirroring the repeated movement of to and from in the act of looking at the works.

Julian Walker trained at the City of London Polytechnic (formerly ‘The Cass’), where he was awarded the Owen Rowley Memorial Prize, and Central St Martins College of Art, and was selected for the New Contemporaries at the Liverpool Biennial in 1999. He was the first artist in residence at The Natural History Museum, in 1996, and was commissioned to make work for the Wellcome Collection and the Embroiderers’ Guild in 2003, Norwich Castle in 2005, the EV&A Biennial Limerick in 2006, and the Millennium Square Greenwich in 2008. Since then he has exhibited with Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, the Contemporary Applied Art Gallery, and the National Trust. Recently his work has featured in exhibitions in Russia, Ukraine, Catalonia, Mexico, Amsterdam, Kolkata, Norwich, Argentina, Berlin, Albania; in his solo show ‘Dark Harbour, The Valley’, Bloqs, London, and in Memories Gone Wild at ISELP, Brussels, with the international group Fictive Archive Investigations. He has taught with the British Library, University of the Arts London, Anglia Ruskin University and the Bishopsgate Institute. He works with print, stitch, sculpture, collage, book-arts and performance.

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Amlan Banaji on ‘City Stressed’ by Julian Walker

These engravings are a good example of the artistic value of irregularity and disorder. Traditionally, Western mathematicians and artists alike have focused on Euclidean geometry of smooth, regular shapes like lines, grids and circles. Since the latter part of the 20th Century, however, there has been a greater recognition of the importance of rough or ‘fractal’ objects which, like Walker’s engravings, display fine and intricate structure at small scales. When discussing the fractal design of Benin city (in present-day Nigeria), ethnomathematician Ron Eglash commented that “When Europeans first came to Africa, they considered the architecture very disorganised and thus primitive. It never occurred to them that the Africans might have been using a form of mathematics that they hadn't even discovered yet.”

One aspect of these artworks which I find notable is how they, like mathematical fractals, can look interesting across a range of scales. When I first looked at them, they appeared to be a disordered mass of lines, but upon close-up inspection one can see intricate patterns appearing. After staring at the engravings for a longer time and at a greater distance, larger patterns began to emerge, formed of several clusters of lines grouped together. I am reminded of an urban landscape, with roads, paths and buildings packed together more densely in some areas than others. As someone who has spent long stretches of time proving theorems about mathematical fractals which are generated by simple recursive procedures, I found it interesting to observe how the patterns of avoidance at small scales can come together to create new and complex patterns at larger scales. I suspect that the scales at which the patterns appear most prominent to a viewer would vary a lot from person to person, depending on factors such as eyesight, the length of time one views it for, and even aspects of the person’s mindset at the time when they are viewing it.

Amlan Banaji is a postdoctoral researcher in mathematics at Loughborough University, and he is especially interested in geometry and analysis related to fractal sets.