Combining elements of sculpture, painting and ceramics, Walker’s multi-dimensional practice creates something familiar in an unfamiliar manner.

For Pipes, Walker returns to his ceramic stoneware frames, used to encase the predominantly monochrome paintings. Acting as a conceptual and visual device for exploration, the artist draws upon the many lineages of pipes as electrical conduits, plumbing fixtures, biological ‘plumbing’ (veins, intestines, valves). Walker also pays homage to his father – New Zealand architect Roger Walker – whose architectural practice often incorporates pipe formations as buildings, windows, peep holes and water tanks.

Pipes simultaneously points with tongue-in-cheek to Marcel Duchamp’s porcelain urinal, Fountain (1917). Duchamp’s pioneering of the readymade enabled Walker to question unconventional languages and methods from which to understand the process, nature and status of art and the privilege afforded to particular mediums.

Jake Walker’s practice displays vestiges of the artist’s hand in its many incarnations via inscriptions of the date, his initials and gestural etchings into the paint’s surface with the end of his brush upon found canvases and salvaged boards. The handmade ceramic frames expose the artist’s rough handling of materials, rejecting clean, hard edges in favour of rugged and organic forms. In deliberate opposition to systems of mass- production, Walker’s multi-dimensional works reflect the tactility and resourcefulness of the handmade. Scaled at an intimate size and acting as a gestural record of time, Pipes invites a slow inspection of subtly to heighten one’s awareness of material, texture and composition.