Iolo Walker
Canaries
24 April - 30 May 2026
Bolding Marylebone
Iolo Walker and Bolding present Canaries, a new series of needlework pieces in their first solo exhibition. Walker employs the medium of digital embroidery to explore how human subjectivity is informed by excavation and expansion. The title Canaries is a reference to their extended research into coalfields and dysmorphic ecologies. Depicted through a high fructose lens, the canary embroideries simultaneously exist as bringers of cheer and of doom.
Research into coalfields and the industrialisation of the South Wales region, specifically Maesteg where their family is from, was a starting point for the exhibition. St John’s Colliery, the largest of the mines in the area, was of particular interest. At its peak, hundreds of men would descend underground each day, forming the backbone of the valley’s workforce while compromising the natural integrity of the surrounding environment.
In the middle of the 20th century in the industrial city of Minamata, Japan, people witnessed a ‘dancing cat fever,’ later identified as the result of mercury-contaminated water discharged into the surrounding bays. The cats had become unwitting indicators of human-induced harm– what scientists call a 'sentinel species': a living organism used as an early warning system for environmental hazard. A century earlier, miners, primarily in Britain, were sending canaries into coal mines for the same purpose. The small birds were used to gauge levels of any leaking toxic gas. If the bird died, it warned workers to mask up and evacuate. The idiom “a canary in a coalmine” now describes an early herald of greater trouble to come.
Fluoro chirping yellow clads out the police horses in Kingdom (Police), as they stand as breathing vantage points in high-vis jackets beneath a rainbow which appeared during cop26 in Glasgow, while the Strathclyde police headquarters were being built. Standing as synecdoche for state power, the police come to be the seen and all-seeing operatives in the public realm. These surreptitious centrally organised operations are embodied in The Looking Tree; an angry amalgam of cameras glaring from a CCTV security tree, descendant of the panopticon.
The works sit atop a wallpaper inspired by the procession of animals in Noah’s Ark, a parade of species carried through catastrophe. Here, wildlife sits at odds with the mass organisation of bodies and the forward-March of technological order; it comes to enact a memento mori. In Mark Z. Danielewski’s book House of Leaves, precariat character Johnny Truant exchanges poems in place of
money for goods. He called them ‘The Pelican Poems’. Embroidery for Walker has similarly taken on this means of monetary exchange as they have found themselves creating needlework to give as gifts or in some instances use as a means of exchange. Thus was born The Canary Embroideries. Walker turns to the depiction of contemporary wildlife via craft- based mediums of needlework and wallpaper-printing as a conduit to reintroducing time, touch and care. Rather than nostalgic gestures, this is an act of recalibration.
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Iolo Walker is a multidisciplinary artist from Newham, currently based in Eryri, Wales. Their practice spans filmmaking, digital embroidery, performance and sculpture, which intertwine to explore mimicry and dysmorphic landscapes. Alongside exploring the materiality of film as a medium, filmmaking is used as an ontological device to research horizontal levels of production.