With Stick Drawings, Carrie Walker continues her exploration of the overlooked, the incidental and the under-appreciated. While much of her previous work has centred on animals and the ways they move through human culture and imagination, this project shifts attention to something seemingly inanimate: the stick. But “inanimate” proves to be an inadequate description. Through Walker’s meticulous drawings, each stick becomes a miniature landscape — etched with the traces of insects, weather, decay, and time. The grain of torn wood reads like cliff faces; the tunnels of borers resemble wandering paths; bark and lichen form an unruly terrain.

Opposite the drawings hang the sticks themselves, each one marked with a small wire-tethered tag listing a title, date, and signature — details that mirror the inscriptions on the drawings. Nearby, a small video screen loops footage of a tricoloured terrier hauling improbably large branches through wooded parks. The terrier is Guess, Walker’s dog, and the sticks are all chosen and transported by her. The dates on the tags refer to when each video was posted to social media, while the drawing titles are borrowed from the songs that accompany those posts. What first appears to be a departure from Walker’s animal subjects is, in fact, deeply entangled with them.

Reflecting on the project, Walker writes about becoming fascinated by Guess’s growing pile of collected sticks — gathered, carried, and ceremoniously deposited at the top of the driveway. She wondered whether drawing the sticks might offer insight into her dog’s compulsion, or whether the act of drawing could echo that behaviour through her own parallel impulse to work, repeat, and accumulate. “My dog doesn’t question her impulses,” she writes. “Why do I question mine?”

Together, the drawings and videos form a meditation on attention — what we notice, what we document, and how meaning forms through repetition and care. The slow labour of drawing sits in deliberate contrast to the quick, looping pleasure of a dog video online. Between these two rhythms lies a subtle proposition: that devotion, curiosity, and curiosity-driven action — whether canine or human — may themselves be forms of understanding.

MEDIUM

graphite on rice paper

ARTIST BIO

Carrie Walker is a visual artist who can’t stay away from words. This entanglement has led her to create zines, artist books, and countless drawings with titles that are far too long. Her work explores the relationship between human and non-human animals by examining how animals are represented in science, popular culture, and art. To that end, she works with drawing, photography, and video, alongside found and appropriated materials including text, paintings, and photographs. Humour and playfulness are a vital part of her practice.

She has a side interest in nominative determinism and has explored aspects of her name and its consequences in works such as The Carrie Walker Project. She is currently working on a series of drawings of the large sticks that her small dog insists on carrying home from the park. The dog’s ongoing stick-selection adventures can be viewed online at @guesswithsticks.

Carrie currently resides on the territory of the lək̓ʷəŋən people (also known as Victoria, Canada).