Municipality Island, 2007

Stephen Walter Biography

Stephen Walter’s most recent project is based around a large map of London. Titled The Island and originally a drawing that took the artist over 2 years to produce and requires a magnifying glass to view, an edition of prints have now been published of the piece, along with 33 accompanying editions taken from segments of the main piece, which represent each London Borough. Geographically accurate and highlighting the city’s main landmarks, main roads, railway lines, built up areas and green spaces, The Island is Walter’s selective listing of London’s history, trivia, local knowledge and stereotypes. Informative but humorous - the work often includes trivia on celebrities done on purely capricious and impulsive grounds – this spoof of an historical map of the capital is an intriguing and spectacular piece that can be viewed for hours.

If you would like a map of a specific London borough, please contact us and we can tell you what we have available. Stephen Walter creates landscapes where objects are slowly taken over by their symbolic representations, creating forests of geographical map symbols and places where every inch is mapped and quantified for human purpose. The ‘awe’, so revered by Walter, is presented by the sheer volume of symbols, paired down and separated from their real state. Tackling the notions of our increasing distance from the land and the outlook of a deeply troubling long-term future, Walter decides to use mundane elements of contemporary and municipal culture to hark back to a sublime space. Here, technology and information provides a new wilderness, unavoidable within the realms of a contemporary sublime. The tight drawing process mimics the growing environmental concerns for the need to ‘cut back’.