WENDY WALKER


Art Criticism
Balthus' Picture-Book
Linked essays about Balthus' self-portraits and his concern with narrative
Chained Books
Chained Books
Books altered to include chains and hinges in the manner of the library at Wimborne Minster, UK.
Critical Fictions
My Man and Other Critical Fictions
Pieces that combine the strategies of fiction and criticism.
Novel
The Secret Service
A fantastical espionage tale in which the agents masquerade as art objects.
Poetic dossier with visual materials; True Crime Poetry
BLUE FIRE: Confessing Constance Kent
A work of formally constrained literature (see news) on the famous 19th century murder case that inspired the first examples of the "sensation novel" and "true crime."
Tales
Knots
Four tales from previous collections, reprinted, edited by L. Timmel Duchamp
The Sea-Rabbit, Or, The Artist of Life
Tales based on the texts of the Brothers Grimm.
Stories Out of Omarie
Tales about love and narrative based on the lais of Marie de France



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BLUE FIRE: Confessing Constance Kent

BLUE FIRE will appear in an installation version at Proteus Gowanus this fall.

"Wendy Walker composes a voluminous, magnificent artists' book incorporating found text, visual elements, and gatefold pages, in which voluminous research gives way, piece by piece, to a taut formal poem, in which is compressed the saga of Constance Kent. The poem comprises one word from each line of Joseph Stapleton’s book The Great Crime of 1860. This poem appears in sequence on the verso pages. On the recto page opposite, passages from various source texts appear, chosen to have the same number of lines as the corresponding passages from the poem do words. In this manner research is translated into a crisp, angular, paratactic poem, which, in turn, becomes a filter for the research. This process subverts history's feigned innocent objectivity by subordinating its documents to the poetic."—William Gillespie

Excerpts from BLUE FIRE have appeared in Marginalia, Projected Letters, the New Review of Literature and the Green Integer Review.


"Screen Memories," a collaboration with artist Florence Neal, based on BLUE FIRE, at the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library.

"Screen Memories" detail.

Four panels of "Screen Memories" in the library of Brooklyn College.

Created by The Authors Guild

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