In Corban Walker's current installation, Mapping, he uses wire to trace a square wave through the centre of the gallery space, while around the edge of the room he hangs a ribbon of Polaroid photographs. The number of photographs, 357, and their distribution around the walls relates to a scale based on the artist's own height of four feet. (A second part of the show in the Merrion Square gallery features work, including Station (NESW), a glowing grid of fluorescent poles, based on the same scale).
Walker, it seems, is using observations about his own relationship to a world which uses a scale closer to six feet than four to explore broader ideas of subjectivity, particularly in terms in vision. The Polaroid photograph offers an ideal tool for this exploration. Its small, square frame works best when chopping the visual continuum into tiny idiosyncratic pieces, dicing it until once recognisable forms break down into an a compendium of stories, a flickering game of "I Spy".
Although Walker has always allowed his own size to provide the key to the work, Mapping still registers as a notably personal, warm work. The artist has previously set himself the problem of forcing minimalist forms to give up their aloofness. Here, with the calm, ordered repetition of the Polaroid square, he has found his most convincing solution yet.
