MARK WALKER & JOHAN ANDRÉN

09.03.25 — 13.04.25

I keep finding myself drawn to physical markings that tell of a past event, or at least a prior

presence that is now an absence. Scars, trace fossils, an imprint my right ear left on my partner’s

shoulder after I lay there for a while, craters from meteorites, the bored carvings I sometimes find

in the benches at bus stops in Oslo, where Mark and I studied together. I think photography, which

I spend so much time with, sometimes leaves me wanting, desiring a more tactile and textured

imprint of the world which I try to capture with my camera. It might also be that I am a millennial

in a hypermediated and simultaneously so de-materialised era. So slick and digital, always shining

behind hardened glass, never accessible to the touch.

I had a pretty horrible bodily sensation when I first understood the origin of Mark’s work made

of coins and razor blades. I’ve never witnessed serious injuries* but I imagine my stomach would

feel the same. He told me that the constitutive parts of his spiral sculpture, two razor blades stuck

to each side of a coin, mimic a street weapon from Northern England. When you cut someone with

this makeshift tool, resulting in two gashes very close together, the thin strip of skin between the

cuts never heals properly, falls off, and leaves a horrible scar behind. Maybe best that this work is

stuck behind glass.

At the same time, the works that we share here are all made by our very careful and caring hands.

When Mark speaks of his studio practice, he speaks of it in terms of labour, spending long periods

of time focused on a process or motif, to see where he and the process can go together. Lately

he has been sending me photos of his spiral drawings, he seems to enjoy the slow and calculated

exploration of this technical geometrical exercise. I’m more eager on the other hand, I want fast

results and an output from my experimentation. When I wanted to materialise my idea of casting

fragments of a human face in tin, I asked my partner to sit for me, “out of convenience” was the

conscious argumentation in my head but of course there’s a deeper meaning to all choices.

Suspended over the spirals of razor blades, the tin fragments of a face are affected and end

up pretty horrible too, they speak more of butchery than the visual aspects of relationships and

emotional mirroring that I’d thought of. Or is it the other way around? Do the cast faces open the

spiral sculpture onto something more latent? There is such a sense of empathy in those cushioned

stands.

When speaking to Mark about our little show, he mentioned that he had been thinking about

planetary and solar rotations when making the spiral drawings, and how that related to the stars

in the blown up rubbing that acts like a backdrop for the whole thing. He texted about vast solar

systems and a sense of mortality.

I wonder if Mark left any marks in Oslo? I think he might be too careful and considerate to

leave those kinds of imprints behind, but I have some snapshots of him.

*However, these days the top posts of my social media feeds are usually images from the genocide in Gaza.

To digitally witness these atrocities is harrowing, to also be living in Norway which like Germany and most of

Europe is passively complicit in the genocide just adds to the feeling of desperate hopelessness. It was a

genocide on the Jews then, it’s a genocide on the Palestinian people now. Free Palestine!