Laurie Walker (artist)  Laurie Walker (February 2, 1962 – February 11, 2011) was a Canadian interdisciplinary artist who produced large scale installations merging mythology and scientific references. She was widely exhibited in Canadian art museums and galleries, and discussed in numerous articles and monographs from 1987 to the early 2000s. In 1984 she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts form Mount Allison University. In 1987 she received a Master of Fine Arts form the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Walker’s early installations combined botanical illustrations with industrial machinery. Utilizing diverse materials (such as: steel, copper, paraffin, watercolour on paper, book, pressed plant, glass, oak, Carrara marble, Belgian black marble, oak, beeswax and more...) Walker analyzed sculptural ciphers across knowledge domains. The theorist Daina Augaitis wrote (in a 1991 essay published by the Banff Centre for the Arts entitled ‘Seeing nature: and the works of Bill Viola and Laurie Walker’): "Each of these works draws on layers of reference which entwine historically constructed notions of knowledge, authority and beauty with contemporary understandings of natural environments." In the first decade after her graduation from university (1987-), Walker's signature style paid rigorous attention to materials. She explored personal identity transformed through a synthesis of ancient mythological references, industrial tools, taxidermy, botanical illustrations and biological organisms (bioluminescent bacteria, pigs bladders, etc...). In 1994, this culminated in a solo show: "Laurie Walker - Seeing Blue" at the Musee d’art contemporain de Montreal, Montreal, QC. The curator of ‘Seeing Blue’, Pierre Landry described how: "The strange seductive power of these works stems as much from the mastery they show in their use of techniques and material, both varied (wood, copper, marble, watercolor) and sometimes, uncommon (peat moss, bioluminescent bacteria…) as from the symbolic information…" In 1994, the critic John Armstrong reiterated these assessments in a review of Walker’s work: "The natural, here as in her other works, is committed to representation's own symbiotic narratives." In her mid career, Walker’s research interests expanded to include biomedical appendages, taxidermy, neurology, projection and EEG. Her eclectic use of materials explored combinations of the organic and synthetic: Kheper beetle, gold leaf, sheep manure, peat moss, overhead projectors, water, IV bags, glass, watercolours on enlarged EEG printouts.