Neil Haddon

Reflections on Jake Walker’s Grog

Closing Event, Salamanca Arts Centre, Kelly’s Garden, 23/3/22

Last year, in July, I opened a group exhibition at Social, the SAC Gallery just around the corner. Jake Walker had work in that exhibition. It was the first time I’d seen his key works. I’d like to revisit some of the comments I made that night because here, in reflecting on this latest show of Jake's work, I feel they are even more appropriate. In my comments that night I mentioned that I had lived in Barcelona, Spain for six years. I lived in the heart of the old quarter, the Barrio Gottico, whose dark meandering streets were enclosed by grimy stuccoed, patched walls that bore the traces of decades of human interaction; they were pitted, scared, and gouged with marks that bore testament to the passing of time and people; they bore the traces not just of movement and flow but also the enduring human need to mark, score and incise simple but profound messages into the surfaces around them: I am here! Go Barca! To hell with the government! And so on. To be clear, this was not just spray-painted graffiti; these were images, symbols and text scored and incised into the fabric of the wall. 

During the Civil War in Spain, these walls were not just sites of commonplace graffiti but sites of resistance, messages passed between clandestine fighters, calls to action, and pleas for information about the missing. Often the messages would be in the form of secret symbols and images to thwart the Fascist forces. Later, after the war the Spanish/Catalan artist Antoni Tapies would take this impulse to mark and score the matter of walls and turn it into a way of working in the studio, transforming thickly encrusted paintings, sculptures, and ceramics into zones of communication whose messages were abstracted, symbolic, informal, and yet seemingly of great import and always with an urgent need to communicate.

 Jake Walker’s work is a powerful evocation of that moment in Spanish art history known as Catalan Informalisme, I know he and I share an interest in that work. And it seems even more appropriate to mention that connection again in regard to this work in this space where we can see the matter of clay, stoneware and paint becoming an expressive medium whose abstracted messages and aspirations are incised into the matter of their making. But here in Kelly’s Garden, so different to the cool white blankness of the contemporary art space, the walls themselves take part in making the work. There is a correspondence between the artwork and the array of patching and repair, some sensitively done and some a poor pastiche of pick-marked convict stone, a pastiche, as it were, of a Tasmanian obsession with recent colonial history and its lingering architectural presence. The material of the walls calls out to the material of Jake’s work, stone to stoneware, pastiched render to glazed abstraction.

And then, there are the keys. If I can call them that, because of course, they are not keys, they are oversized, flattened, coloured, fragile objects that take that thing that we know a key and make it strange. So, they are strange keys. And if they are strange keys, what locks do they fit and what spaces do they give us access to? I want to know the answer and I don’t want to know the answer. I’m happy to be given access to that space of keyness, of opening and revealing, of secret symbol and unlocking, just as I am happy to be brought back to the material of clay and paint, suspended.

And as to the title of the show ‘grog’. As we know, it’s a common generic term for alcohol, but in its correct usage, it is an impure mixture of alcohol sometimes watered-down rum, sometimes mixtures of different spirits but never the pure thing. And then there’s groggy, meaning dazed or unable to apprehend with precision what is happening around you. Like when a key is a key and not a key, or a wall is not a wall. 

But as Jake points out in the wall text, grog is also a term for an aggregate of pre-fired material or crushed brick, or rock which is added to the clay making it stronger during the firing in the kiln. I like the idea that embedded in the making of Jake's work, in its very firing, is a material that is immutable, which will not expand or contract in the intense heat of a kiln. But that stability is fragmentary, it’s bits and pieces, partial. And so, here’s what the keys and indeed the bottles of grog, and the plates, and the other forms might offer: and that is a movement between stability and uncertainty, a movement between what I know and what is only groggily apprehended and yet is as solid as a rock.

© Neil Haddon, March 2022

More information on Jake Walker’s work: https://stationgallery.com/artist/jake-walker/