Walker is a painter and sculptor who lives in Bayswater, Nova Scotia. The Flagmen, a series of freestanding welded and assembled sculptures (1998-2000), are his millennium project.
Built from scrap steel and wrecker’s yard scroungings, they display the artist’s fusion of surreal aesthetics with a rural handyman’s inventiveness and a lapsed Catholic’s taste for the macabre. Several are studded with beach cobbles and equipped with wheels, combining the testicular with the vehicular. Walker’s anthropomorphic constructions offer a doomster parody of the machismo exemplified by David Smith’s mid-20th-century sculpture. The Flagmen are exhibited with paintings representing a South Shore vision of the apocalypse.
Artist’s Talk
Gallery visitors had an opportunity to meet Peter Walker on Saturday, April 28. He was introduced by sculptor Arthur Handy, who taught in MSVU’s Fine Arts Program.
