Elliot Walker

BIO

Elliot Walker is a UK-based sculptor who works with glass. Walker’s career as an artist has been dynamic and demanding, moving from 4 years of education in the industrial midlands, to the heart of London, working as part of Peter Layton’s, London Glass Blowing studio team for the following 8 years. 

During this time, Walker also ran his own practice from studios in the Midlands, Wiltshire, Kings Cross, and eventually in Hertford.

The four years in the Hertford studio marked a major shift in Walker's prospects. Given the time, space, and freedom to develop his distinctive style in sculpture, Elliot's work and skill base increased in notoriety and demand. 

In 2022, Elliot was selected as a contestant on the surprise Netflix hit show ‘Blown Away’. 

The series introduces audiences to a varied cast of talent from all over the world, with many differing outlooks on the art of glass making and its place in the broader art scene. It also injects the ultimate element of TV drama: competition. 

Through cool-headed determination, Elliot was crowned the winner of season 2, finishing the series with an incredible autobiographical installation, put together with help from the Corning Museum of Glass team in just 8 hours. 

The subsequent explosion of interest in his work prompted another move, this time to a very special area for glassmaking in the UK.

Walkers Studio now resides on a site with over 200 years of glass history, and one of the 4 remaining traditional glass cones in the UK. 

The Red House Glass Cone is a 100-foot-high, late 17th-century brick cone constructed as a giant chimney. It housed the multi-pot furnace and up to 12 teams of glass makers. Over the years, the Cone has produced everything from sheet glass and cut crystal to cameo glass.

Walker and his team bring a definite contemporary edge to the site, and in this new environment, his work will continue to develop and flourish.

Artist statement

The golden age of glass-making ran right alongside the golden age of Still life, from the 15th to the 17th century. Stunning and rare examples of Venetian opulence and Bohemian High Baroque glass are often used as examples of luxury and decadence in many Dutch masterworks. Depicting glass with oil paint requires a high level of skill due to its transparency, refractive index and its ability to reflect textures and colours surrounding it. 

Creating my sculpture requires the same consideration of composition, contrast, and use of light, but I use glass as the medium and canvas. 

The act of making these pieces inherently questions the idea of function. Elaborate goblets and vessels are rendered useless by their integration into the sculpture as if they were painted on board, and meticulously sculpted fruits and meats are just as inedible as pigmented oil. 

Whilst my work, by its very focus, requires a profound understanding of the material and its technical application, I have developed an interesting dichotomy in my thoughts and emotional response towards the purity of technical value and its relation to function. My series IRREVERENCE and recently TOTAL IRREVERENCE are my attempts to express this contradiction. The creation of these Venetian-inspired goblets requires the highest level of control and technical skill, and the difficulty of this is a source of enormous frustration and huge pride in those who pursue the practice. All of this emotional and temporal investment culminates in a vessel from which to drink, one of the oldest inventions of humankind. Glass as a material is historically bound to the idea of function and by transforming these refined forms into a state where their function has been destroyed, I am elevating them away from this idea towards something more theoretical. The perceived violence by which this is done also expresses the rejection of the dogma that has developed in their creation methods.  

My newest collection of dichromatic flower vases further investigate the other great vain of still life painting. These sculptures hybridise the ostentatious bouquets of the European baroque style and the similarly outrageous designs and construction methods seen in Venetian chandeliers. The delicate millefleur of lilac and hydrangea repose within fern-like arms and gently curving leaves. Each element is blown to allow for a thin metal fitting to support the structure and act as a steam; the only thing missing is the lightbulbs. Using a single glass colour in the blooms adds to the visual drama and the idea that these flowers are eternal, but shifting light highlights the reflective surface and subtle transmission of this special colour.