The Wireless Set
Ten Digital Prints by James Faure Walker
(acquired by the V&A)
One of the early adopters of digital technology, James Faure Walker (b.1948) began developing computer graphics alongside his painting in 1988. He won the ‘Golden Plotter’ prize at Computerkunst, Gladbeck, Germany in 1998. He has eleven works in the Victoria and Albert Museum, where his work was featured in ‘Digital Pioneers’ in 2009. His book, ‘Painting the Digital River: How an Artist Learned to Love the Computer’, was published by Prentice Hall (USA) in 2006, and awarded a New England Book Show Award. The book can be purchased from Amazon.
£ POA (unframed), the archival inkjet prints in the set are titled/signed, numbered and limited to an edition of 10.
Please contact the gallery for further information and to purchase.
I didn’t begin with any idea at all about radios. It was during lockdown, when initially I wondered how I could manage what you might call critical distance. Normally I move each day between digital work and painting, watercolour and oil paint, but unable to get to my studio I spent almost four months working exclusively digitally. I was also writing an essay about this, ‘Speed Limits’. Next to my desk is an old GEC radio of around 1950, one collected by my late brother-in-law, acquired through boot sales. I had long wondered how I could make use of them, perhaps simply by drawing them.
I read up about them, and looked at many examples, and if nothing else here was a great source for titles, chosen more or less at random. I was attracted by the arbitrariness of the designs, the styling, such as in the thirties having a streamlined box – a wireless called ‘Airflo’. There are parallels with the lack of function in making digital paintings – or prints. Similarly, the first digital cameras I used more than thirty years ago did not look at all like cameras.
James Faure Walker, 2020