Artnose Artists

 Wim Waals

 Born Wuppertal, Germany, 1975. Studied Silversmiths College     Oregon, 1994-97

     

     A Short Stroll with Ariadne
       cibachrome, 2000

Waals has been acclaimed as one of the most promising earthwork photographers of his generation. His 400-mile walk across the Urals in 2000 (left), which he called  A Short Stroll With Ariadne, required the artist to spit on rocks and stones at regular intervals of three hundred yards for the duration of the walk. "I wanted to be able to find my way back and for civilisation to be able to find me should I have perished in that sublime wilderness," wrote Waals in the catalogue of the exhibition of his photographs at the Hayward Gallery.

"The dripping of my own bodily fluid - the expectoration of an ephemeral substance that will dissolve and disappear in that environment in a matter of minutes - guaranteed the futility of both the exercise itself and my hope of redemption, while underscoring the transience of our existence in the face of this eternal, majestic landscape."

Waals, the son of a Belgian carpenter, is currently undergoing psychiatric treatment at a spa in Frankfurt, but is planning to crawl along the Great Wall of China in 2004, a performance that he expects will take him two years to complete. He has already sold television rights to a US satellite channel for exclusive coverage of the crawl and has set up an international franchise to market a line of branded casual sports clothing to be know as 'Wim Wear'.

"The Great Wall of China is the only man-made structure that can be seen from space," says Waals. "The intergalactic gods will gaze down, see my diminutive crawling form and proclaim, 'Behold! The Great Waals of China.'"

Artnose Artists - Quick Links

  Yuk Foo & Fuk Yoo
  Wim Waals
  Euan Mee
  Pixel Popadopoulos
  Diego Vasquez
  Juan Peccadiño (The Barber of Solihull)
  Mimmo Gulbenkian

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