young professionals

‘Young Professionals’ is a new installation by Ker Wallwork for their Part A of CT20’s Artist Cultural Pathway programme. The installation consists of a Window Installation on 73 Tontine Street, as well as a RISO printed Text.

For this installation Wallwork revisits an earlier body of work, and their experience as a young fine-art graduate then working as a front-of-house staff at a council-run museum/gallery. During which, Wallwork turned the daily administrative ritual into a playful artist residency, and began staging micro performances & interventions within the confines of the workplace, such as ‘testing which cupboards and other spaces I could fit inside and using unused work materials to make things’.

The Window Installation & Text use humour and satire to talk about the modern condition of work, and explore ideas about resisting the logics of productivity and efficiency, drawing references from ‘Health and Efficiency: Fatigue, the Science of Work, and the Making of the Working-Class Body’ by Steffan Blaney and also the figure of Mary from Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt – ‘a servant who spends all her shifts eating in a mechanical way so that hand and mouth are never empty’, according to Wallwork. 

Exported to our current times in Folkestone, the work feels candid, empathetic and highly relatable to our own internal frustrations and resistance to the logics of productivity and efficiency – as a newer and slicker form of bottomless extraction and surveillance disguised as ‘freedom’ and promoted by digital capitalism.  

Executed with a characteristic language of precision, minimalism and humour by Wallwork, the artworks on the windows that make up the proscenium frame are fragments of the text, photos from previous performance works and cut-out paintings of female hands by female Baroque painters, Louise Moillon and Artemisia Gentileschi. The lower halves of the windows are partially obscured by tracing paper with printed marks that resemble hieroglyphic alphabets, delicate but impenetrable. The space beyond the window is not accessible to the public but becomes a staged backdrop: with carefully positioned objects: (a ceramic hat) and illuminated by a tinted glow of SAD lamps that is supposed to have the effect of improved efficiency.

Nina Shen, April 2025

[Gallery image]: Ker Wallwork

Behind the large S, and a little way behind the large E, was a gap you could stand within and be unseen.

You had to enter this gap side-on and edge in to where the space deepened slightly. Once inside you could creep your feet forward and rest the flat of your back against the wall. Pass some time with face relaxed, unspeaking.

The large letters were upstairs in the original building’s entrance hall. The branding had focused on the contemporary extension, a new wing in an angular ship-sail design, the kind beloved by architects in coastal locations. The original civic building, which was co-opted into the new wing’s purpose, was brushed over in the publicity but made up a large proportion of the space. As such the majority of the building had not been designed with Sports, Culture and Leisure in mind. Its original purpose was the maintenance or administration of justice, as defined by the rules and logic of the state.

The large letters, along with various screens and MDF structures, had been installed in an attempt to camouflage the building’s original embodiment of state power and instead conjure an atmosphere of family-friendly educational leisure. Despite these efforts, the most engaged visitors were those who had previously worked in the building as foot soldiers of ‘justice’. They would enlist your attention as they tried to map their previous roles onto the new floor plan, speaking back into being the old holding cells and courts.

The public areas were well-surveilled by security cameras that broadcast to small screens on the desks of the managers.

The managers had been transferred in from the closed-down public swimming pool as a way to avoid council redundancies while reducing services. One was diligent but lacking in confidence with human interaction and the other was charming but lacking in diligence. It was therefore the case that despite being closely monitored, it was possible for employees to find ways to take back time during paid hours.

Using the signage to avoid the public was not your only exercise in idleness. Lying on the floor, you’d marvel at how long you could remain prostrate without causing alarm or being tripped over. Hours were spent quietly in the stock and staff rooms building precarious structures. Happily withdrawing from function, you would think of Mary from Samuel Beckett’s novel ‘Watt’.

Mary is a housemaid by employment but a devotee to rest and relaxation by nature. She would settle herself before a task as if about to begin but instead of performing her duties, she ate [1].

As her neglected cloth fell to the dust on the floor, Mary’s expression remained impenetrable. Her inner life was entirely her own. Days would pass where the only things to leave her lips were crumbs as she chewed potatoes, fruit, sandwiches and pastries that she took from a pouch concealed in her skirts. She would press the food into her mouth open-palmed as her hands flashed back and forth with the regularity of piston-rods [2].

Mary’s neck was swollen with scrofulous lumps, indicative of tuberculosis, but bound by the logics of servitude she returned to work each day without fail [3].

Between 1870 and 1939 a new model of health emerged in Britain focused on the working body. This ‘science of work’ viewed fatigue as the ultimate pathology of the working-classes and aimed to maximise economic productivity by transforming the body of the worker into a machine. Indefatigable and absorbed into her relentless mechanical chewing, Mary is the robot ‘gone rogue’ version of this inhumane pursuit.

As you lie on the floor behind the till with your feet resting inside a box of discontinued postcards, moving your hand from pocket to mouth, from mouth pocket, free of an unutterable pressure, you take Mary as your guide.

Ker Wallwork, 2025

[1]: Beckett, Samuel, Watt, Faber and Faber, London, 2009, p.42

[2]: ibid, p. 45-46

[3]: ibid, p. 45

Ker Wallwork is an artist who lives and works in London. Their multi-disciplinary practice is concerned with language, communication, queerness, sickness and the welfare state. Working with moving-image, text, sculpture and archival projects, their work considers the potentials of miscommunication through disordered and humorous narratives.

CT20’s Artist Cultural Research Pathway programme is a new research platform, and a springboard for a new creative trajectory by an early to mid career artist. Its key purpose is to develop new aesthetic languages that speak more accurately about the age in which we live, and the crisis and challenges we face. Its key criteria are to re-align creative practices with cultural relevance, and to bring local audiences alongside the artist’s creative journey. The programme lasts approx 12-18 months and is delivered in 3 stages, including a commission of a new piece of work.