Self Portrait (Venice)

In early 2025 Victoria Miro invited Walker to be in residence in Venice for two months during which she was to create work for an immediate exhibition in their Venice gallery. This new body of work, Self Portrait (Venice), features self-portraits created in dialogue with Old Masters and the experience of being an anonymous figure immersed in the city. The issues central to Walker’s practice of belonging, power, visibility and representation are, within this series, turned inwards as she spent this extended time in Venice as an anonymous figure in a city of endlessly shifting light, water and reflection.

Within these works and Walker's eyes are ideas of freedom, vulnerability, permanence, transience, public perception and private reflection. Her various stance and stare is always one of self-confrontation, and her mark-making contains different emotional registers in the different works, at times calm, at others turbulent and unpredictable. And all with some blank space on the page, or parts of her remaining 'unfinsihed' to capture the fact she is constantly evolving, and throughout this residency in particular, being challenged and changed.