Corban walker biography of mahatma

These biographies are excerpted from Art and Architecture of Ireland Volume III: Sculpture 1600-2000, edited by Andrew Carpenter and Paula Murphy and published by the Royal Irish Academy.

WALKER, CORBAN (b.

1967).

By Paula Murphy 

While still a student at NCAD, in 1989, Corban Walker showed Tiny Big Man at Sculpture in Context (qv) in Fernhill Gardens, Dublin. The work, a tiny figure surmounting a tall narrow plinth, addressed the issue of scale, and not without a degree of humour.

In the following year, at the NCAD degree show, his Please be Seated (UCD) [312], a gigantic wooden chair, was intended ‘to open people’s eyes’ to the way in which the world is ordered to human scale, on the assumption that the average male height is six feet (IT, 16 June 1990).

In his early practice, Walker was exploring overtly the relationship between himself – he is approximately four-feet tall – and the built environment.