Twenty Truant Shapes, 2024
A performance curated by Victoria Sharples. Featuring: Nathan Walker.
An installation of low structures and apertures that frame a body in parts, where language, speech, and memory are also dissected. Twenty Truant Shapes is a durational performance that sustains a tension between interior and exterior sound, visible and invisible bodies, and light and heavy forms.
Nathan Walker is an artist and writer from West Cumbria, working across and between performance art and poetry. Their work explores voices, sounds and language as material.
Short essay: ‘I went camping once, too’ by Alexander Stubbs is available to read on their Substack. It momentarily reflects on Walker’s performance. Below is an excerpt:
[...] in the company of a burnt orange camping tarp, strung up at the corners, moving, adjusting, readjusting, uttering single words, and - at points – climbed out from under it to walk around and play with scattered objects. We spent around ten minutes sitting and watching. Cross-legged on the painted black hard floor. Admiring the dedication to sustained performance, lulling ourselves into inattention. Grasping at that still, motionless body under the cover and wishing that its presence in the room would force every lick of attention out of us. Eventually we left, but not before becoming part of it all. As our hands lifted the carabiner, and we grazed the tops of our heads on the corner of the straps tugging the tarp into place, we shared a moment with the body in hiding. And it stirred something in me. A forgotten dream, or something else. In that small square room, all at once we had wild camped [...].
Twenty Truant Shapes featured as part of the Sheffield Showcase 2024. Supported by Sheffield City Council.
Photographs: Victoria Sharples.
A performance curated by Victoria Sharples. Featuring: Nathan Walker.
An installation of low structures and apertures that frame a body in parts, where language, speech, and memory are also dissected. Twenty Truant Shapes is a durational performance that sustains a tension between interior and exterior sound, visible and invisible bodies, and light and heavy forms.
Nathan Walker is an artist and writer from West Cumbria, working across and between performance art and poetry. Their work explores voices, sounds and language as material.
Short essay: ‘I went camping once, too’ by Alexander Stubbs is available to read on their Substack. It momentarily reflects on Walker’s performance. Below is an excerpt:
[...] in the company of a burnt orange camping tarp, strung up at the corners, moving, adjusting, readjusting, uttering single words, and - at points – climbed out from under it to walk around and play with scattered objects. We spent around ten minutes sitting and watching. Cross-legged on the painted black hard floor. Admiring the dedication to sustained performance, lulling ourselves into inattention. Grasping at that still, motionless body under the cover and wishing that its presence in the room would force every lick of attention out of us. Eventually we left, but not before becoming part of it all. As our hands lifted the carabiner, and we grazed the tops of our heads on the corner of the straps tugging the tarp into place, we shared a moment with the body in hiding. And it stirred something in me. A forgotten dream, or something else. In that small square room, all at once we had wild camped [...].
Twenty Truant Shapes featured as part of the Sheffield Showcase 2024. Supported by Sheffield City Council.
Photographs: Victoria Sharples.
