AGE: 35
BASED IN: New York
Kristin Walsh’s sculptures exist somewhere between sleek fantasy and a bad trip. They take the shape of industrial apparatuses extruded through a fever dream—gears, engines, carburetors, street lamps—their contours smoothed into clean ambiguity. They often appear turned on their head or installed on the wrong side, as if experiencing a psychic breakdown.
Walsh fabricates everything in her Yonkers studio, which you might be surprised by given their perfect finishes—any trace of the artist’s hand is buffed away, aligning each work with the dehumanized reality of modern mass production while also subverting it. Walsh cuts, welds, and polishes her enigmatic sculptures from sheet and tube metal—a grueling, labor-intensive process that simultaneously refers to and ignores the entire history of industrialized efficiency—making it both beautiful and dysfunctional. By yanking public infrastructure from its daily context, Walsh is making visible the barely hidden systems that govern our movements, laying bare the outsize agency we allow gleaming scrap to exert on our lives.
Walsh’s work has been included in group exhibitions at Helena Anrather, Lisson, and other taste-making Manhattan galleries. Her solo debut came this September at Petzel’s Uptown space: a curdled paean to the city’s hostile subway architecture—turnstile gates, defensive grab poles, toxic fume–belching gas engines, and other mechanical nightmares.
A native of Emerald Isle, North Carolina, Walsh isn’t self-taught—but in many ways, her practice is closer to vocational trade than fine art production, more machinist than Modigliani. “I’ve always made objects,” she says. “I’m less interested in art than I am in things.” She spends a lot of time trawling “car guy” forums. “You figure out a way to get there, but maybe it’s not the easiest way. I would love to have a union guy come by the studio one day and show me some tricks.”
