LUKE M. WALKER - FINE ARTIST
b.1969
Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2019
Winner of the Signature Art Prize for Painting 2015
Artist in Residence, Bankside Hotel. Photo by Peter Jackson
Luke M Walker is a London-based artist whose practice explores the relationship between landscape, memory, time, distance and materiality. Working across painting, interventions and collaborative projects, Walker examines how environments are experienced, recorded and transformed. His practice is rooted in walking, through which he gathers observations, data and traces of movement from both urban and remote landscapes.
Measured data, including length, pace, altitude and number of steps, informs his Datascapes series, in which the act of walking is translated into physical and painterly form.
These works function as landscapes of time and distance, connecting the artist’s movement through place with the processes of studio production. Through works constructed from data, memory, imagination and direct observation, Walker considers the wider implications of human activity, from the construction of cities to environmental stewardship and the artist’s role as witness.
In his recent Speculative Landscapes, Walker extends these concerns through a process of intervention, chance and transformation. Activated by mediums and gravity, layers of paint flow, separate and merge, echoing the natural and human forces that shape land, including tectonics, weather, erosion and development. The resulting works occupy a space between observation and imagination, evoking landscapes that are at once familiar, uncertain and transformed.
Walker graduated with an MA in Fine Art from City & Guilds of London Art School in 2014 and has exhibited widely across the UK and internationally, including at the RA Summer Exhibition in 2019.
From November 2018 to February 2019, he was Contemporary Collective’s first Artist in Residence at Bankside Hotel, London, where he developed a body of work in response to the rapidly changing surrounding locality. In February 2023, he returned to create The London Panorama, a seven-and-a-half-metre charcoal depiction of the River Thames.
His work has been presented in solo exhibitions with DegreeArt Contemporary and Zasso Gallery, Taiwan, as well as in joint and group exhibitions across the UK, Europe and Taiwan. These include joint exhibitions with WanLin Chang in 2019 and 2020 examining relationships with cities, and a solo exhibition in Taichung in 2024. Alongside his studio practice, Walker is a Fine Art tutor at City & Guilds of London Art School and co-founder of The Wilderness Art Collective, which promotes engagement with landscape and environmental issues through contemporary art. He is also a member of The Place Collective and became a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 2019.