Two anonymous girls. One ancient astrophysics textbook. A decades-old secret.
A fascinating, highly illustrated, epistolary novel perfect for fans of Rainbow Rowell and Alice Oseman.
When a recent transfer student starts keeping her diary in the oldest textbook at the Green Bank High School library, the last thing she expects is to receive a response. Thus begins a sweeping tale of unlikely friendship and long-buried secrets between two secret pen pals at a rural West Virginia high school.
Copernicus is adrift and searching for answers after the sudden death of her mother, and leaving her cosmopolitan life in San Francisco behind. Kepler is a small-town girl with straight A’s and big plans to be the first person in her family to go to college, despite her family’s modest means. The two girls are so different from one another but united in their goal to solve a mystery that has riddled Green Bank for decades.
Meticulously hand-drawn by debut author Jessica Walker across the pages of an actual ancient astrophsyics textbook, The Secret Astronomers is a story of friendship, family, crop circles, secret crushes, giant telescopes, life in Appalachia, and two girls discovering new ways to connect across any divide that separates them.
"Language is also central to a recent series of drawings where alliterative phrases like Myth, Meth, Mess or Backwards, Backwoods are first handwritten, then scanned into the computer, and finally arranged as interlacing patterns resembling stained glass windows."
Leila Cartier, "Color Me Bad" exhibition catalog, 2012.
Before Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Mae Jemison, Frida Kahlo, and others were change-making feminists, they were . . . babies! In this board book that’s perfect for budding feminists, discover what these iconic figures might have looked like as adorable babies and toddlers. With its inspiring message that any baby can grow up to make the world a better place for all genders, this board book makes the perfect baby gift for any family that wants to raise children who can recognize Gloria Steinem on sight.
“Embargo” is a video work in which I have removed the image of my body, frame-by-frame from tourist footage I captured during a recent trip to Havana, Cuba. The outline of the body is replaced with a ghostly blurred image moving throughout the city streets.
Code created to export video frames into textile patterns.
Recent 2D Design Work.
For one year I traveled across Australia by meeting and interacting with people who share my surname--Walker, to explore tolerance, hospitality and kinship among strangers. Using this conceptual strategy of repeating chance encounters, I met 70 Australian Walker families from Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, Cairns, Brisbane, Sydney and many small towns along the way. The work documented here is excerpted from an exhibition, which was shown at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Melbourne. Included are a collection of Walker hums, a series of Walker teachings, Walker wisdoms and other works that piece together a fictitious family portrait. Each Walker vignette is a glimpse into the negotiation performed by strangers whose defenses must dissolve in order to form an unlikely relationship.
This project was made possible through generous support from the Australian-American Fulbright Commission and the RMIT School of Art. Special thanks go to RMIT Head of School of Art, Professor Elizabeth Grierson, Associate Professor Lesley Duxbury, Senior Lecturer, Dominic Redfern, Gallery Director, Stephen Gallagher, Gallery Manager, Andrew Tetzlaff, Intern, Harry Metcalf, PhD candidate, Clyde McGill and of course all the kind, open-minded and generous Walkers who took a risk in participating in this project.
Pattern Recognition is a series of looped video footage that I collected in Southwestern Virginia during the summers of 2006 and 2007. These tableaus reflect my exploration of pattern,
ranging from those I found in the rural Appalachian landscape to performed patterns, like human habits and gestures that I recorded while interviewing friends and family. During this process of
collecting, I realized that it was important for me to distance my video camera from the stereotypes of rural America, and rather, focus on the visual aspects of what makes Appalachia unique and captivating. This approach has guided me towards constructing narratives that are more expressive than representational and more archaeological than cinematic. The video is edited in various ways to highlight specific moments of pattern. In many cases I found that speeding up, slowing down or stacking clips side-by-side, made the patterned instances more evident. In this sense, I approach editing as an expressive language for video, where my formal and conceptual decisions are brought to the surface.
