Wellington-born artist Jake Walker recently returned from Australia, to set up a home and studio in Featherston. In response to the slickness of much contemporary art, his work is determinedly handmade. He calls it ‘folk modernism’. Walker makes ceramic objects, rustic textured abstract-landscape paintings, and combinations of the two—he often presents paintings in sculptural ceramic frames that compete with them for our attention. Walker, whose father is architect Roger Walker, grew up in a Wellington postmodernist architectural milieu. His works are informed by the circles and turrets of his dad’s buildings and by the quirky organicism of Ian Athfield’s rambling Khandallah complex, in which he lived for a spell as a child. He explains, ‘I was depicting what I thought was essentially fantasy architecture, wrestling paintings into the realms of sculpture ... There’s always that sense of one thing imposed over another.’
