Luke M Walker

Luke M Walker returned to the studio for his second residency, celebrating the four-year anniversary of Bankside’s first ever residency featuring Luke.

He is an urban landscape painter who believes that art should raise awareness about environment issues. During his time in the studio Luke focused on the changing landscape of London and the Thames.

Luke M Walker views his practice as an inquiry into memory, time, distance and materiality with each series of works being an opportunity to discover something new, through experimentation, exploration, chance, the collection of data and other records of his personal progress through the environment, whether a city or somewhere further afield. It is an attempt to discover the role of a Landscape Artist today.

He was Contemproary Collective’s first Artist in Residence at Bankside Hotel, London from November 2018 – February 2019, where he made a series of walks from the residency space and painted the locality, a site undergoing immense change.

Much of his work derives from exploration, primarily through walking. This can involve collecting specific data on walks; the length, the pace, the altitude or number of steps etc. and translating the data into a painting which become physical representations of the momentary act of walking itself. These ‘potential landscapes’ are also paintings of time and distance and it is these additional spatial and temporal qualities that he is keen to express whether through constructed landscapes or from a direct observation of the environment, they act as a record of both the activity of the artist in the landscape but also in the studio.

What once might have been described as homage to the environment has now become something more adversarial, with each body of work beginning to question the value of human activity; whether this is the construction of our cities, our stewardship of the environment or the role of the artist as a witness and how this can be expressed.

Open House

Art Yard Maker’s Studio has an open-house policy, so if you‘re visiting our neighbourhood’s major art galleries, Southbank Centre, Tate Modern or Hayward Gallery why not stop by to see an artist at work.