Cheryl Walker

Inspired by fluid movement and organic form, my drawing centered practice is informed by automatic drawing and intuitive mark making. My drawings are the material result of an ephemeral exploration of the connection between all life forms. Automatic drawing provides a point of entry into a metaphoric world of intuitive, invented, and imagined imagery that reflects upon the relationship of the visible exterior landscape of natural forms to the invisible internal landscape of the body. It allows me to access the personal, biological, environmental and formal relationships between landscape and the body. My work results from the process of exploring growth, renewal, transformation and the connections between all life forms. Interaction with nature and interaction with one another motivate opportunities for growth, renewal, and transformation.

Collaborative performance and the resulting interactions have had a profound effect on my studio practice. Improvisation and meditative movement greatly inform my drawing process. My drawings are now the size of my reach as I move across the floor with my entire body, pressing wide graphite sticks with my hands and feet in multiple directions, in continuous, overlapping marks of varying density. Each drawing is a mapping of a moving meditation and the emerging unexpected. Now, instead of responding to the movement of another, I respond directly to my own movement as it evolves in its own time and space continuum.

Cheryl Walker has been actively exhibiting her work in Los Angeles and nationally for three decades and her work is held in private collections internationally. She has created live visual effects in collaborative performance at REDCAT and MOCA. Walker has performed with Emilie Conrad, the founder of Continuum Movement, Rachel Rosenthal’s TOHUBOHU! Extreme Theater Ensemble, Simone Forti, and many others. Walker was recently commissioned to create a nine-venue participatory public art project in Minneapolis, MN and, she has created numerous public art installations in the greater Los Angeles region.

Walker completed an MFA in Drawing and Painting at California State University, Long Beach as well as graduate studies in Design at UCLA and English at the University of Minnesota. She currently teaches at Long Beach City College and Santa Monica Emeritus College. Through her long affiliation with the MOCA education department, Walker has also facilitated numerous educational partnerships and collaborations with LA Master Chorale, LA Opera, LA Philharmonic, UCLA Live, LAUSD Teachers, LA County Museum of Art, Craft and Folk Art Museum, Japanese American National Museum, Torrance Art Museum, CityLife, Armory Center for the Arts, LA Municipal Art Gallery, and the National Council of Jewish Women.