John Walter

My practice is driven by an understanding of painting and drawing as thinking technologies - tools for processing complexity through visual means. I work across media and disciplines, developing projects that operate through what I describe as convolution: a recursive movement of ideas, forms, and methods across contexts, generating transformation through recombination. Rather than stabilising a singular artistic identity, I cultivate a practice that moves between positions - artist, curator, writer, collaborator - holding contradiction as a productive condition.

At the core of my work are visual dictionaries: expansive bodies of drawings and paintings that function as both intimate records and generative reservoirs. These accumulate into larger installations, performances, and environments, where painting becomes a form of world-building. I construct contexts - bars, tarot systems, immersive spaces - in which the work can circulate socially, inviting participation and dialogue.

My research engages themes of virology, cultural transmission, and mortality, often drawing analogies between biological and cultural systems. Pattern, ornament, and repetition operate as both subject and method, reflecting on how images behave like memes - replicating, mutating, and persisting.

Through collaboration with artists, architects, and scientists, I extend my practice beyond disciplinary boundaries. In doing so, I seek to create conditions where knowledge is not fixed, but continuously reconfigured through encounter, exchange, and embodied experience.

I am a London-based artist working across a wide-range of media rooted in the pictorial. My practice explores how ideas, images, materials and biological systems evolve and circulate, often through collaborations with scientists, architects and researchers. This has included me thinking about memes, and more recently skeuomorphs, as ways of theorising what I do in the studio.

I studied Foundation at Chelsea College of Art & Design, before undertaking a BFA at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art Oxford, and an MFA in Painting as the Slade School of Fine Art London. Much later I completed a PhD in Architecture at the University of Westminster, enabling me to undertake research for my large-scale installation Alien Sex Club (2015), which addressed HIV as a crisis of representation. 

I was a Sainsbury Scholar at the British School at Rome and have undertaken residencies including the Quantitative Biosciences Institute at the University of California San Francisco, the Kavli Institute of Nanosciences Delft and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

My work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including the Wellcome Collection, HOME Manchester, Matt's Gallery, SOMArts San Francisco, Exeter Phoenix and the Warburg Institute. My projects have been supported by Wellcome, Arts Council England, and the Churchill Fellowship. In 2017 I curated Shonky: The Aesthetics of Awkwardness for Hayward Gallery Touring Exhibitions as winner of the Curatorial Open 2016.

My work is held in the Arts Council Collection, the Walker Art Gallery and the Ashmolean Museum. Alongside my studio practice I lecture widely in Fine Art and Architecture and currently teach at Anglia Ruskin University, and serve as External Examiner in Fine Art at Swansea College of Art.