Healing Gestures: Works by Taryn Walker
Nicholas Hertz’s reflections on this work can be found here
Live studio visit with Taryn and fellow SNAP emerging artist in residence Nicholas Hertz was held on March 29, 2022. Watch the recorded conversation below.
A Lesson In Listening
Over the course of the pandemic, my work has focused on paths to healing, tenderness, and imaginings of optimistic futures.
The figures included in the wax preserved drawings are representations of the future - powerful, beautiful, and often gender ambiguous. I see the figures I have created as optimistic and resilient beings: beings that deeply love themselves, their communities — both human and animal, and the Earth. When coated in wax another layer is created; a wall transparent and sturdy, the narratives of these beings preserved, but their gestures, marks, and essence continuing to breathe out.
Read more about A Lesson In Listening here.
Since We Can’t Dance Together
My 2021 installation piece Since We Can’t Dance Together, takes these explorations of the future one step further. This artwork presented viewers with a quiet moment to contemplate concepts of intimacy, tenderness, togetherness, collective healing, and possible utopian futures. Suspended in the structure of a locked greenhouse, wax-coated ink drawings of figures and insects dance in harmony, amplified by infinite reflections in hanging mirrors above a living garden. The greenhouse presents an ironically enclosed structure. Barriers of glass, wood, and locked doors prevented viewers from entering the utopic space, creating a sensation of yearning. Inside the space, drawings of figures and insects closely interact—something that is currently impossible for us to do as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since We Can’t Dance Together presented viewers with a sculptural imagining of an optimistic future and the possibility for healing. The wax-coated drawings of the beings and bugs, as well as the living installation of plants, are all representations of resilience, community, and the paths to healing. I see plants as the ultimate healers—the ultimate teachers of resiliency and perseverance. Since We Can’t Dance Together celebrates this and creates a meditative space in which we can introspectively contemplate life after the pandemic and the world we would like to rebuild.
Read more about Since We Can’t Dance Together here.
The Breathing Wall
In addition to this, the media pieces I have been developing are documentations of natural landscapes. In a world that is so visually driven due to platforms like Instagram, landscapes often become the backdrop to our lives instead of the source. I am interested in exploring how when faced with landscape in the form of a soundscape or slow-paced videoscape the viewer will be forced to actively listen to the landscape instead of just seeing it. In my eyes, actively listening to one another is integral to the process of healing. I see a direct relationship between listening to the land and healing it, as well as listening to each other and healing ourselves. As my ancestor's primary form of preserving information, stories, and histories was oral, I see listening as an act of preservation — by listening to the land we preserve it for the generations to come.
This body of work is not only an ode to the journey of healing, but a gesture of presence, reflection, and tenderness in a time of grief, division, and adversity.
Read more about The Breathing Wall here.
About the Artist
Instagram: @twalkermedia | Website: tarynwalkermedia.com
Taryn Walker is a queer, interdisciplinary Indigenous artist of Nlka'pamux, Syilx, and mixed European ancestry whose work explores concepts of identity, tenderness, healing, cycles of life and death, and the supernatural through drawing, printmaking, installation, and video.
In 2018 Walker graduated from the University of Victoria’s BFA program.
Taryn is currently an Emerging Artist in Residence at SNAP in Edmonton, AB, and will be exhibiting work at the SNAP Gallery in May 2022.
Walker was awarded the Diane Mary Hallam Achievement Award by UVic for academic excellence and commitment to the arts in 2018 and in 2017 they were also longlisted for the Philip B. Lind Emerging Artist Prize, presented by the Presentation House Gallery for demonstrating excellence as an emerging video artist and photographer.
Taryn’s artistic practice and research has been presented and supported by spaces, events, and granting streams across Western Canada and beyond.