When I first encountered Carrie Walker’s drawings five years ago, I was surprised by her ability to elevate her animal subjects beyond the figurative and into a surprising and emotionally captivating world. In the autumn of 2009, I rediscovered her work at Gastown’s Jeffrey Boone Gallery and began to understand the very special domain Walker’s subjects inhabit.
Carrie Walker studied printmaking at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, where she learned the technique of precision drawing. Walker, soft-spoken and cerebral, says she “liked the immediacy.” We are sitting in her studio, poring over artwork, field guides and volumes of animal encyclopedias. Walker’s first chapter of work began shortly after graduation, drawing primates. “I was looking for some human emotion in them but that seemed almost too simple,” she says, then pauses for a moment. “So I started drawing chickens.” Thus began Walker’s fascination with the “underdogs of the animal world” as she calls them: the rodents, small birds and bit-part players that make up the majority of the 300 drawings in her first series. On the page these tiny beasts—whether a hare, a mouse, or yes, a chicken—display an eerie range of human emotions. The portraits are often titled by their encyclopedic or field note entry: If It Were Not for the Enormous Number of Enemies… is the title for a yellow-necked field mouse. “In the end, I don’t consider the work to be about animals,” says Walker. “I’m interested in how humans write about animals as if they have intentions.”
The artist’s interest in intentionality continues into her next series, “Carrie Walkers”. So far only a few months in the making, the project is also portrait based, using images found through online search engines of other women named Carrie Walker. Each image is drawn in exact detail, and then uploaded to Walker’s website, where Google’s trawlers find them and include them in future “Carrie Walker” searches. Sometimes the drawings are displayed right beside the actual subject. Titles for the art are taken from the subjects’ profile updates or employee bios. As a Woman I Love to be Ravished is one; I Got Clean and Sober 18 Years Ago is another. Still, the world of humans has its limitations. “The women are in quite blasé photos for the most part,” Walker says. “It’s funny that it’s the humans causing me consternation.”
Walker’s most recent body of work, and the series that reacquainted me with her, is called Found Drawings. Using old and amateur drawings purchased from eBay, Walker creates a collaborative piece with the artworks’ unwitting original authors. Walker brings new life to each sketch or landscape by inserting her own drawings of birds and beasts onto them. The animals often appear much larger than scale; they are no longer the underdogs of the animal world. Here, cygnets can capsize sailboats and mountain goats teeter on rooftops, each so carefully inserted that it’s sometimes hard to tell what elements of the drawing don’t belong. In Walker’s world, there is no doubt that animals breathe new life into a potentially banal human landscape.
Several weeks after this interview, Carrie Walker’s studio was destroyed by fire. Thankfully, she was able to recover nearly 200 drawings.
