Alex Walker

Portals

Melbourne Art Fair | 19 - 22 February 2026

The artist would like to acknowledge that the land on which this work was made and is being shown belongs to the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation, and pay deepest respect to Elders, past and present.

Alex Walker is based in Naarm/Melbourne, each piece was hand printed by the artist in the colour darkroom.

Enormous thanks to Wetlab and Colour Factory.

Alex Walker is a trained darkroom photographer based in Naarm/Melbourne interested in expanded photographic theory, analogue processes and spatial perception.Expanding on the literal meaning of photography as ‘drawing with light’, Alex explores the moment of image capture and extends photography to its limits by reducing it to its core elements: light, space and perception.As well as traditional photographic methods, Alex employs projection and installation to expand the photograph beyond its two-dimensional form into a physical and phenomenological, bodily encounter.Alex is a PhD candidate at Monash University and has a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours from the Victorian College of the Arts.

For Melbourne Art Fair 2026, Alex Walker will present a series of large-scale, handmade colour darkroom prints exploring the materiality and conceptual role of light within the darkroom process. The work reflects on light’s essential function - not only as a physical entity but as the primary agent of creation within analogue photographic practice. This process, where light bends, shifts, and interacts with the film, forms the very foundation of an analogue photograph. It is through the delicate refraction of light within the camera’s body that an image is made possible. Each work captures that subtle but profound transformation, holding space for both the tangible and intangible qualities of light. Each image can be considered a life-sized portal - a moment in which the audience can step through and into the photographic process itself. The flat surface of the print becomes a window into the unseen, showing us not just a captured image, but the very passage of light that enables it to exist. 

Alex Walker