Off the scale

CORBAN WALKER is used to the stares. He gets them every day, and he gets them everywhere he goes, because people do not expect a man to look as Walker does. They do not expect a man to stand four feet tall. So they stare. It’s predictable, says Walker. It’s boring. It’s “very, very repetitive”. But it’s also fascinating, he says.

“I’m interested to know why people react like that. And to know what control I have over it. And particularly when the person has no idea who I am or what I do, I don’t have any control over it.” At least, not outside the studio. But when he’s in his studio Walker turns those questions of control, scale and perspective into sculptures and installations that are startling and challenging. Throughout his career, Walker has worked from an exactly calibrated set of mathematical principles out of which every element of his art is created. His is a unique take on minimalism. Every slab of glass, every tube of neon, every vinyl panel, every aluminium rod is mapped on to the personal system he has titled Corbanscale, which comprises just what its name suggests: a sense of scale oriented from a visual height of four feet.

“Basically, I realised that the rules by which every building has been built since the Renaissance, the golden section, were very problematic,” says Walker, who was born in Dublin in 1967, the son of the architect Robin Walker and the art critic Dorothy Walker. “Because every rule of and approach to architecture, and of how we live, and how we get from A to B – Le Corbusier’s modular, all these ideas of what size a man is, and what that means to his surroundings – is unrelated to my stature or proportions, to my means for getting around. I became very keen to try and pursue a new sense of understanding scale, of mapping a given space and environment.”

In 2000, Walker created an installation, Mapping 4, working with the physical constraints of the PaceWildenstein Gallery (since renamed the Pace Gallery), in New York. At a 2002 exhibition at Green on Red Gallery, in Dublin, viewers had to stoop to peer inside his miniature, marvellously intricate glass sculptures, suggestive of models for enormous modernist buildings.

For a 2003 installation called Water Fallingat County Hall in Limerick, Walker positioned a series of metal trays on an atrium wall to an almost absurd height; there were 44 trays. A year later he worked with another vast atrium, that of the Ballymun Civic Centre, in which he placed a set of LED "stitches" knitting two high walls together and playfully jolting the space into a new sense of scale.

His 2007 show Gr id Stack, at PaceWildenstein, consisted of sculptures in glass, aluminium and steel; the glass was thinly stacked, the steel and aluminium stood in walls or grids and each piece stood no more then 44in high. And last year at the Flag Art Foundation, in New York, Walker took part in Size Does Matter, an exhibition curated by the NBA basketball player Shaquille O'Neal. His installation, in blue and green vinyl, explored the distance and the intersections between his own sightline and that of the 7ft tall O'Neal.

Walker has lived in New York since 2004; he moved to the city, he says, because of a dearth of collectors for his kind of work – architectural sculpture and installation – in Ireland. But his connection to Ireland remains strong.

Earlier this year, he was named one of the newest members of Aosdána, and next month he will represent Ireland at the 54th Venice Biennale. Walker was selected last summer from a shortlist of Irish artists, having been nominated by Emily-Jane Kirwan, a director at Pace Gallery who has also been appointed Irish commissioner for the biennale. The exhibition curator is Eamon Maxwell, the director of Lismore Castle Arts, and Ireland’s representation is managed by Culture Ireland, in partnership with the Arts Council. Although Walker will represent Ireland, another Irish artist, Gerard Byrne, will show work in the biennale’s International Art Exhibition at the invitation of the director, Bice Curiger.

After the Arts Council of Northern Ireland declared last year that it could not commit the funds necessary to send an artist to Venice, it looked for a time unlikely that the Irish pavilion would be based in the well-situated venue it had enjoyed since 2009: the Istituto Santa Maria della Pietà, set on the Grand Canal, between Piazza San Marco and the Giardini. But access was secured, and Walker’s sculptural installations will comprise an intervention or a negotiation with the centuries-old interior architecture of the Pietà, where the ceilings soar skywards and ornate arches lacking any architectural symmetry ornament the walls. During an early research visit to the Pietà, Walker discovered that one of these arches corresponded neatly to his own scale. This, he says, is when he realised he could work with the space. But it was on his journey home from Venice last November that he began to realise the form his work for the biennale was going to take, and that it would comprise an engagement and an overt commentary not typical of his approach.

In 2008, he made a small piece that consisted of three interlocking steel cubes, a response of sorts to the Lehman Brothers collapse and its consequences. Called Please Adjust, the piece asked the viewer to intervene by sliding the steel frames in a direction of their choice. "But if you did so," Walker says, "it would fall into another position, which could happen quite precariously and even violently as a result of your action. Any small movement would have a much larger effect beyond the element you were actually touching. And the idea was that this tangible experience of playing with something was quite seductive."

Then last November, as Walker returned from a trip to Venice, news broke of the EU-IMF bailout for Ireland. “And that news, those headlines, you just couldn’t get away from them, couldn’t get them out of your mind at night. Because it was clear that the financial crisis in Ireland was of far greater impact on people within the country than was the case in the US.” It was a matter, then, of proportion and of scale, which meant that it was a matter for Walker’s art. He began work on a much larger version of Please Adjust, designed to fill the interior of the Pietà in Venice, to tower over the viewer with its mathematically precise set of angles and intersections, its Corbanscale-derived conjugations.

“It was a very new and weird place that everybody found themselves in, emotionally and socially and in every way,” Walker says. “It was a very severe adjustment, realignment, recalibration of the western world.”

Walker will also map the interior of the Pietà with two vinyl installations, Transparent Walland Modular, which will be laid on to the interior glass of the building's front and back windows, distorting the light of Venice as it streams into the space. As with much of Walker's ouevre, the work, as viewed in his studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, combines a beautiful sense of delicacy with a glinting toughness; the transparency of his materials, the presence within his work of thin air, refracts their clear-sighted complexity.

“I think there is a general reaction to the work that it is kind of offputting or excitable, that it is provocative,” he says. “People are not really expecting to be challenged in that way. And there is this sense that they’ve been deliberately put in this situation; not forced into it, but placed in a different environment. And that’s going to impact on how they continue on in their surroundings, from this point on.”

But his work is moving on, he says, from the preoccupation with how people see him or how he projects himself within given spaces. The outward-looking aspect of the Venice piece may be one of the first large-scale manifestations of that shift within his thinking. “I think it’s important,” he says, “rather than being stuck in a place where you’re constantly questioning other people’s values, or what you know or don’t know of their values, to take control. To be freer, and more experimental, and even contradictory: that’s what’s interesting, I think.

“They always say you work best with the things you know, and that’s basically the way I’ve worked. But I think now, though, that the work is opening itself up to exploring different possibilities, a different sense of what I feel is important. That the work is opening up, now, to something of a wider frame.”

Corban Walker’s exhibition at the Irish Pavilion at the Istituto Santa Maria della Pietà, in Venice, will run from next Saturday to November 27th. The app Corban Walker: Ireland at Venice 2011 is free to download