Judith Walker
About
Judith Walker (b. 1955, Leeds) is a London-based artist whose diverse, four-decade practice spans cartoons painting, installation, stand-up performance, zines and workshops.
Working across both figurative and abstract modes, Walker employs line, colour, texture, text, and the interplay of negative and positive space to explore complex emotional landscapes. Her work frequently reflects on childhood memories, bodily autonomy, and the tensions between joy and isolation with humour.
In recent years, Walker’s practice has turned toward the inner body, particularly the human gut, as a site of fascination, celebration, and critique. Drawing on her lived experience with Crohn’s disease and dyslexia, her work highlights the pain of hidden disabilities. She has collaborated with patients and medical professionals through workshops and participated in Stomach Ache, an ongoing research-curatorial project by the University of Melbourne examining gastrointestinal health through creative practices. In 2021, she produced and contributed to Digest Reader, a zine funded by TACO! in London. She has also led workshops and presented her work at the Arts & Health Hub and the Royal Academy of Arts.
She studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, where she earned a BA (Hons) and won the Winsor & Newton Young Artist Award. Further studies took her to New Mexico State University and a research degree at Birkbeck, University of London.
Since returning to the UK from New Mexico in 1980, Walker has maintained her practice in south-east London. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at institutions and organisations including the Cartoon Museum, Southwark Park Galleries, Artquest, Cob Gallery, Acme Project Space and the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition. Early in her career, she was selected for New Contemporaries, exhibiting at the ICA in 1977.
When it comes to exhibiting, Walker is drawn to unconventional and public spaces, such as a disused prison cell at the Koppel Station Project (2023), the Window Gallery at Acme Propeller Factory (2024), Peckham Library (2001–02) and London South Bank University (1997). Walker has exhibited internationally in group shows in Italy, Poland and New Mexico.
Parallel to her fine art practice, Walker has had a distinguished career as a cartoonist and editor. She served as managing editor of the cult magazine Duck Soup, which offered early platforms for many influential cartoonists. She has contributed regular strips to The Sun, New Humanist and many others. More recently, she was cartoonist-in-residence at University College London Hospital and was featured in The Inking Women (2017), a landmark book and accompanying exhibition at the Cartoon Museum celebrating 250 years of British women cartoonists.
In recognition of her cultural contributions, Walker was named one of the Inspirational Women of Leeds,” with her name included in Pippa Hale’s public sculpture Ribbons.
[Biography provided by Judith Walker, May 2025]
References used in biography
https://cartoons.judithwalker.co.uk/