Border Crossings
Volume 25 Number 1,
Issue No. 97

Head Count: The Drawings of Carrie Walker

"I flip through piles of books and select images I think I can see emotion in," Walker told me. "I date each drawing because I think I'm making a record of my own emotional state by the face I choose to draw." When monkey faces proved to be so readily sympathetic, Walker moved on to a species that might pose more of a challenge. She began to look for "the same intensity of emotion in the face of a creature I considered the most... blank," so she did a series of chickens. From a churlish Lafleche to a a frumpy Danvers. Few people would pride themselves on their resemblance to a drawing of a chicken, and Walker's ink bristles with a subversive touch of black comedy, a slightly misanthropic anthropomorphism on the part of the artist. She went on to draw dozens of chickens, and vultures. Many more conventionally pretty birds were included in her aviary of ambiguity - then squirrels, racoons and wildcats were added along with other lowly creepers among the animal kingdom.

"Big animals don't fit on the paper," Walker said, "Besides, big animals get enough attention as it it. Drawing rodents, bats and other so-called varmints is me giving attention to beings sometimes overlooked." Many of her meticulously drawn varmints would fit in the aperature between thumb and index finger. The rest of the page is beautifully empty. And while not precisely to life scale, the smaller the animal, the more empty space remains on the page, until it gets down to mice, chickadees and voles, whose tiny heads require careful inspection in order to appreciate the detail. On an expanse of untouched paper, Walker can pull a singular identity from even the aerodynamic, jewel-eyed wren. She has made a great selection of bats, all of which are hilarious and monstrous, devious little creatures halfway between simian and nightmare. "The difference between a hen and a bat," Walker said, "is that hens seem always to look kind of crazy, and while a bat may look weird, they can also look very cute." The bats are but one species among many other underdogs Walker has celebrated with deftly realistic handling, right down to a portrait of a thuggish, small-toothed palm civet. A particularly adorable long-tailed weasel head with cinnamon black eyes, a sensitive nose and a wet mouth is described in the title as from a species of "diabolically efficient killers, formidable in their own little worlds."

Taken as a whole, the series, which today counts approximately 200 heads of all different species, has the look and feel of a straight study of animal physiognomy, but there are subtle reverberations of amusment in this tribute to Durer and Audobon that belie the surface intentionto classify and compare animal heads. There's a kind-hearted irony to the project, suggested by the titles, such as the one for the profile of a gopher-like creatures: Mzab Gundi Massoutiera mzabi January 11, 2005, "There were fantastic tales about them combing themselves in the moonlight."

Each of her titles includes the English and Latin names of the animal, the date she made the drawing and a quote from he books where she found the pictures on which the animal is based. "My favourite kind of title is to find a piece of text in which the author has placed a judgment on the animal," Walker told me. "It's hard to find that in newer books-- due to political correctness, I believe. Strictly speaking, they're factual but with both the animal and the text out of context, they can end up being absurd or poetic, sometimes even political. I'm interested that, in the past, humans have described animals in such terms as ugly, villainous, diabolical."

Whether it's an aesthetic commentary on the Egyptian vulture--"Rather repulsive"-- or the maternal subtext of barnyard fowl--"The chicks are doing fine without their mother" (which also became the name of her 2004 solo show at the ZieherSmith Gallery in New York)-- the titles apply a shade of the self-recursive logic of modern art to the great aspirations of the naturalist. Neither does the uniformity of the series address the puzzles of Darwin, nor offer an Audubonian record of known species. Walker's curiously myopic compositions isolate the head from what would have been a regular page in a nature book, and highlight the unmistakable charisma of her subjects, but also isolate the same kind of ambiguous language that would have accompanied the original image. Her work is a taxonomy of irregularities, subjectivities and biases within the naturalist tradition.

She does share the naturalist's stunning facility with the pen. Her animals are vividly alive in the ink. The works from her recent solo show in the spring of 2005 at the Kristi Engle Gallery in Los Angeles, "Will Fight If Cornered," featured a bestiary of extraordinary emotional range. The lips of the wildcat glisten around the dry, furred tongue pressed against the bottom fangs. The eyes of a grey fox express all the melancholy wisdom of a war vet, and its hair is as lovingly tousled as Durer's famous Young Hare of 1502. With its dreaming gaze, the meticulous detail of its features on a monochrome background, Durer's hare is a very close relation to Walker's rabbits. She too has drawn animals, to "find out the nature of formless Chaos, where the elements stream forth in forms of beauty with discordant purpose...Find out with soaring mind the causes of individual things," as Durer's contemporary, the poet Conrad, wrote in his Odes, published in 1513.

Durer's grim portrait of the stag wit an arrow through its skull, driven behind its dead eye, is perhaps the highest artistic peak of anti-animism, at perfect equilibrium between materialism and sympathy. Alexandre Francois Desportes's aristocratic Self-Portrait as a Huntsman shows the artist as master of his environment, surrounded by dead animals and loyal dogs. But isolate the head of the dead rabbit on he bottom right, or the head of the crumpled corpse of a grouse nearby, and you have a Walker. Encircle any one of the heads of the birds in the trees, or the rabbit and rooster at the bottom of The Earthly Paradise by Renaissance painter Jacopo Bassano, and void the rest of the picure, and there a piece by Walker appears. Jean-Baptiste Oudry's Dead Row is an image that evokes a human presence by way of a rifle, but focus here on the twisted gooseneck and its splayed beak, or the head of the deer with its twisted throat, or Stubbs's Green Monkey, with the jaundiced fur and neurotic, sunken eyes, and you see Carrie Walker is drawing the portraits of the formidable victim, and low-lifes in the history of art.

"I haven't drawn any hunting scenes yet, though I think about it a lot," she told me. "I've done some drawings of predators with prey. And I've done some drawings based on photographs of taxidermied animals. I like the idea of how removed the drawing is from the original source of the image, though the viewer would have no way of knowing that."

There have been plenty of critters in her work but only a few domestics. "Completely different connotations from wild animals," Walker has said about pets. Notable exceptions are the two drawings of her whippet Trooper, one of which is a noble aquiline profile much like Augustus John's drawing of the same breed, while her other drawing reveals the slightly comic insecurities and sweet loyalty in her whippet's eyes and lips, an emphasis that suggests the same level of self-conscious dependency as Durer's drawing of a greyhound. It's possible to overlook the individuality of the dogs in Durer's or John's versions, and become distracted by the sleek beauty of their forms. But after viewing Trooper's face in Walker's floating-ink spotlights, the personalities of Durer's and John's dogs come through heartbreakingly, for they, like us, adored their owners.

Walker's process is an intriguing development in the naturalist genre, appropriate for the time in which she works, where highly personal archives and expert image curatorials are an ever-greater part of an artist's practice. With her unsorted, ever-expanding menagerie, Walker classifies more than animal physiognomy. In fact, taxonomy is almost a by-product of her goal. Her real emphasis is on the metaphor of the animal as a subject in art.

It's intriguing how Walker highlights the unconscious biases of the naturalist-- the snake-whispers in the ear of objectivity-- that separate her work from the science of mere classification. The 19th-century outsider artist Edward Hicks made nearly a hundred versions of the landscape of the Peaceable Kingdom before Eve, where Adam and the entire animal world lived in perfect harmony, and perhaps Walker has made as many and more cose-ups from the myth, pointing, like Adam, to a wary, exhausted and long-snouted little creature and naming it Golden-Rumped Elephant Shrew, "Probably communicates...probably outrun...probably learned...probably futile." November 24, 2004. A name, a title, transfers a certain status or lack of status on the subject. Walker's drawings serialize the judgments of naturalism. Where naturalism attempted to separate itself from animism using scientific inquiry, Walker's animals attempt to merge the two distinct threads of animals through art.

On the west coast, where Walker was born (in 1972) and has lived her entire life, the totemism of Salish and Haida culture has provided British Columbia with a tradition of animals in art that spans centuries and is among the world's most revered spiritual works. An inevitable influence for a Vancouver artist working in the zoomorphic tradition, First Nations art in the region is hardly in its gloaming. It has as much of a contemporaneous relationship to Walker's art as does postmodern conceptualism. According to the pioneering anthropologist Franz Boas, in west Kwakiutl culture, the mouse was the "messenger of supernatural beings." And in giving precedent to all the varmints, Walker inverts the Western tradition of anthropomorphic heroicism and chooses to put her attention on "messengers"-- the pagan familiars whose status in iconography is less understood and whose meaning for the viewer is therefore more flexible, more secular.

And while Walker's drawings are more ironic than the traditions that may have informed her work, Modernism is as much an influence on her ideas as the intentions of mediaeval Japanese art from the Heian and Edo periods, when images of birds represented, as the curator and Oriental art specialist Harold Stern has said, "spirits cloaked in the mantle of nature." There are drawings by Walker that share a poeticism with watercolorists from the 17th century like Watanabe Shiko, whose handling of the owl is strikingly similar to Walker's, and Soga Nichokuan, whose hawks and eagles are profound in their minimalism and express a like-minded close attention to individuality. These artworks feel like far-distant relatives to Walker's own peregrines and turkeys, not through a common spirituality so much as a quest for art to express something of the impossibility of truly representing the spirit of an animal. For all our compassion, there's an unassailable mystery that separates our consciousness from nature. The difference with Walker, of course, is that she's one step further removed from the natural environment than all her predecessors. Her drawings are based on pictures of animals and not taken directly from nature, which complicates their beauty. They are a form of animal representation after the age of mechanical reproduction. "I'm interested in what scientists will do to an animal in order to better understand it. My drawing of a caged squirrel is horrifying to a lot of people but the reality is that biologists are constantly capturing, caging and banding animals in an attempt to understand them and conserve their populations," she said.

Carrie Walker's project is a quiet inclusion among Vancouver's artists with a particular interest in archives, like Steven Shearer's accumulation of vernacular imagery in the black metal and grindcore music scenes and Geoffrey Farmer's recent cancerous installation of objects from the Vancouver Art Gallery's own basement. Walker is an unorthodox taxonomist, whose focus has been metaphor, the subjectivities of language, and the emotional pitch in our depiction of animals in art.

While she regularly adds animals to the series of heads, this year she began her first experiments with a new set of works. These also focus on heads, located using Google image searches with the keywords "Carrie Walker." Instead of animals, this time it's people who happen to share her name. She has set about to paint the face of each Carrie Walker found on-line with the same dexterous ease as her drawings, making explicit the addition of the visual degradation of 8-by-10-inch copies of low-res jpegs. There are printer lines and large square patches of color, and a general out-of-focus quality to many of them that again, as with the animals, refers to the images from which she's working. The insouciance is upped a notch, maybe, but none the wiser.

When the musician Jonathan Richman saw an early show of her monkeys, he was heard to comment, "That's all you need, right? Just heads." It was a simple row of heads, appearing one page at a time on the wall of Zulu Records, an indie record store in Vancouver, but Richman, undoubtedly with his good musical intuition, recognized the relationship the pieces had, tangentially, to his kind of modern music. The music critic Simon Reynolds, writing a profile of the rock group Animal Collective in a recent issue of the Wire magazine, said that "animals, anthropomorphism, and animis are common preoccupations in psychedelic music. Think of Syd Barrett with his Wind in the Willows obsession, his worship of trees and ditties about effervescing elephants and a mouse called Gerald; or Incredible String Band with songs about hedgehogs, puppies, snakes and minotaurs. The four members of Animal Collective revere the natural world." Walker's art suggests, with great modesty, that people have always expressed themselves most honestly in their treatment of wild animals.

"I'm interested in ow some animals have become emblematic," Walker told me. "The bald eagle is a funny one. Benjamin Franklin opposed its being the emblem of the USA, saying: 'I wish that the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country, he is a bird of bad moral character, he does not get his living honestly, you may have seen him perched on some dead tree, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the labour of the fishing-hawk, and when that diligent bird has at length taken a fish, and is bearing to its nest for the support of his mate and young ones, the bald eagle pursues him and takes it from him... Besides he is a rank coward; the little kingbird, not bigger than a sparrow attacks him boldly and drives him out of the district. He is therefore by no means a proper emblem for the brave and honest... of America... For a truth, the turkey is in comparison a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America... a bird of courage, and would not hesitate to attack a grenadier of the British guards, who should presume to invade his farmyard with a red coat on.'"

Franklin's turkey and Walker's menagerie both intend to upend the pecking order, if only for a moment, by focusing on the unsung achievements-- as opposed to the flaws-- of the lesser loved creatures of the world. Even the beauty of the ape, for instance, has inspired few leaders, but Walker treats the runts of the aesthetic jungle as emblems worthy of crests, and flags worthy of nations.

-Lee Henderson

Lee Henderson is the author of The Broken Record Technique (Penguin Canada). He lives in Vancouver, where he's working on his next book and writing about art. He is a Contributing Editor to Border Crossings.

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