- R A Walden’s work is concerned with physicality and its interplay with other social categorisations and power differentials.
- At the core of their practice is an interrogation of embodiment under late stage capitalism.
- Walden’s work questions contemporary western society's relationship with care, tenderness and fragility in relation to our bodies, our communities and our failing ecosystems.
- They explore this through lenses of crip theory, queer theory, sci-fi and speculative fiction.
- Walden is interested in our ability and failure to navigate physicality, interdependency and vulnerability both communally and individually.
- How can access remain generative?
- What are the limits of translation?
- What can we find at the edges and boundary layers of ability and somatic experience?
- Recent work seeks to disturb overly simplistic understandings of the disabled body, looking to bring an ethic of care, a connection between the land and the body, and a cripped concept of performance into conversation with their work.
- Walden understands world-building not as a visionary tool for an imagined future, but as an embodied methodology for the now.
- Their practice spans text, sculpture, printed matter, performance and video, all of which is undertaken with a socially engaged and research-led working methodology.