Sculpting Toward Truth - What Happens When A Biology Professor Takes Chisel to Stone

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David Walker, a professor of medicine at the University of British Columbia nurtures his sculptures on the weekends. At left David poses with his Golgi apparatus in his studio. At right is "Egyptian Princess," a female torso, which was exhibited at the Burnaby Art Gallery last month.

David Walker used to think being a cell biologist was serious work. That was until he began to paint. 

“Art gives me a way of looking at the architecture of life,” the associate professor of medicine at the University of British Columbia says over the phone from his Vancouver west side home. “[It] allows you to sort of translate the feelings that come from the biology into something easier to share with people.” The 61-year-old’s most recent sculptures will be exhibited at the VanDusen Botanical Garden in Vancouver this August.

Walker picked up painting after a close friend of his passed away without pursuing his own interest in art about 20 years ago. Before long Walker had signed up for an intensive sculpting class that eventually led him to take a marble-carving course in the Colorado town of, yes that’s right, Marble. These days Walker still teaches at the university but spends each Saturday at his very first sculpting teacher’s studio, chiseling and chipping away.

“Medicine envelops him,” says Carmen Lasley, of the Sculptors’ Society of British Columbia, who credits Walker’s sense of discipline for his development as a sculptor over the past seven years. Walker’s understanding of dynamic living things and his portrayal of them in static stone are informed by his background in biology, says Lasley.

Over the course of his three-decade scientific career Walker has taken nearly 20,000 negatives of cells and tissues. He’s even modeled in clay the complexities of white blood cell migration to the lungs to help him understand it. “The science has dribbled over into the art stuff,” he explains.

Just last year Walker began to carve a piece of marble the size of a gym locker into a Golgi apparatus (pictured above). He hopes to install this macroscopic interpretation of a cell’s packaging plant in a public fountain. “Most people who see a Golgi apparatus have no idea what they’re looking at, but if they see it and see it as beautiful then they don’t need to understand it – though understanding it deepens your experience of it – they just need to appreciate it.”

These days Walker sculpts alabaster and marble from photographic images to share his own sense of wonder at the world, be it wonderment at what he calls “living through the eyes” or fascination with the architecture of life. His interpretation of the natural world, represented, say, by cellular structures or the human form, highlight the beauty of the commonplace.

When Walker teaches medicine or pathology, he is storytelling – verifiable and replicable stories to be sure – to give meaning to life. To him, science is an asymptotic story that never quite reaches the truth.

As a teacher, he helps his students use scientific tools for storytelling. As an artist he uses painting and sculpture to convey the feelings that the language of science can’t quite express. 

David Walker will be exhibiting recent work at VanDusen Botanical Garden in Vancouver from August 4 to 6, 2007.