Corban Walker: As Far As I Can See

Corban Walker is an internationally renowned artist based in Ireland who creates installations, sculpture and drawings that focus on human-made systems and perceptions of scale.

As Far As I Can See shows Walker’s distinctive sculptural and installation works sited in the Crawford Art Gallery’s historic Gibson and Long Room galleries where, using his Corbanscale, the works disorientate and reorientate audience perceptions. 

Walker’s specific philosophies of scale and sensitivity to local and cultural contexts are central to how he defines and realises his work. As artist and critic Brian O’Doherty has written: “Corban Walker establishes himself as measure of his own art as body as mirror, module, standard (ie. Corbanscale). With this insistence—it is nothing less—he remakes his environment according to his own measure.” 

In removing the Gallery’s significant Collection works from the part wood-panelled Gibson Galleries, Walker has created a new work responding to this context which addresses the interplay between space and perception. Consisting of a mirrored installation, Beyond the Rail I-IX disrupts and constructs alternative conditions where the viewer may become part of the object. 

Along with interventions of recent glass and amber acrylic works including Untitled (10 x 4 mitre) and 129-40, Walker has sited the installation TV Man astride the 19th-century grand staircase where the artist’s image fits, to scale, in a 65-inch screen. Where paintings of eighteenth-century luminaries of the British Empire have previously been sited, Walker constructs and reclaims marginalised histories and, in the process, also underwrites the future.

In the 18th-century Long Room, Walker’s selection of over thirty works from the Collection further brings the artist’s perspective to the fore and questions—as the artist has noted—“how we orientate ourselves to recognizable objects and environments, both in very specific compositions and by opposite stylistic means.”

Through his work, Corban Walker offers audiences an opportunity to interrogate their own actions and interactions with the world around them in the hope of enriching one’s understanding of perception.

Recent solo exhibitions and projects include: BUSHY, Bushy Park, Sculpture Dublin (2022), Condition Canal, Gowanus Projects, New York; Come What May, Centre Cultural Irlandais, Paris; You are Here with Niamh O’Malley, Maud Cotter and Nikolas Fouré, La Tannerie, Bégard, France (2018). Walker received the Pollock Krasner Award in 2015 and represented Ireland at the 54th Venice International Art Biennale in 2011. 

Crawford Art Gallery is a national cultural instiutition (Cork, Ireland)  and is dedicated to contemporary and historical Irish and international visual art. It offers a vibrant and dynamic programme of temporary exhibitions which probe the future, contemplate the present and reveal the past to create engaging conversations across the timelines. Located in a significant heritage building in the heart of Cork city it is also home to a collection of national importance.