- Sometimes I feel a little bit like I'm a, a New Yorker cartoonist.

Instead of making a, a drawing pull out a saw.

I am the head and sometimes sole member of a somewhat a meic group of artists in, in New Orleans called Saboto Studios, which is an acronym.

It stands for Splinters and Blisters and Tetanus.

Oh my.

Because we largely work with dirty old Splintery wood, rusty metal, and the like.

The piece is called The Burden of the Beast.

We Humanity Are, are, are the Beast.

And it is sort of an allegory of, of where we are in the world right now.

- Nobody wants to get hit over the head with a message about sea level rise in a very kind of dark, doomsday manner.

I think that's what's so interesting about Walker's work.

He does address these serious topics, but in a way that is approachable.

- There's a bit of improvisation with my process.

I love things that have a story to them.

I use reclaimed materials partially for aesthetic.

I love the way they look, but also is part of the, the statement of the piece.

This is actually almost entirely made out of reclaimed materials from houses which have been damaged by hurricanes and the effects of climate change.

I actually took the, the siding from old houses, the roof shingles we actually made out of fences that were destroyed during Hurricane Ida.

The legs are 13 feet long, which if you're building anything new along the bayou, you've gotta build it 13 feet off the ground.

It's the a hundred year flood mark.

There's something funny about in New Orleans, your doorframe is never straight.

It's all built on swamps, so everything's always settling.

So if you look at the doorframe from the front, you can see it's just kind of outta skew.

It is enough to make the framing an absolute nightmare.

I've always been a math kid.

It definitely plays a huge part, but I like to, I like to hide the math.

I don't want you to see it and think that looks like a math problem.

And it is full of full, full, full of math problems.

I don't want it to look like sacred geometry.

I do like it to lean more heavily into the full cart.

I walk this funny line.

Obviously if something's this big, it needs to be engineered, but I, I like it to feel a lot more handmade.

This was my first big piece going out to Burning Man.

Biggest thing I'd ever done.

And as we were coming in a hurricane for the first time in like 80 years was coming up through, like, it came up through California.

I was heading straight through the desert and I was getting dismayed and then I remembered this whole thing is about persevering in the face of a hurricane.

So we carried on and while we were at Burning Man, I, I had a panel.

I sat for a panel discussion - And I got to listen to him talk about his work, particularly the large bison piece, burden of the beast.

- And we, we followed up after the event - And I knew that it would resonate with the, our community here in Hampton Roads.

- It's based off the North American Plains bison, which was on the brink of extinction and carried on.

When there's a storm coming through the bison, you know, they understand it in a way that they'll actually run the opposite direction and as a result they'll wind up in that storm for less time.

So it's, you know, a, a perfect metaphor for, for weathering a storm, for getting through it.

I also just love the, the image of it.

It's a beautiful silhouette and it's just kind of this classic American icon of strength.

You're supposed to have this sort of sense of nostalgia.

My goal is to make it feel like everybody's grandmother's house.

Like it's just sort of supposed to have this element that, that feels like it's from your past.

My style is a large scale dream scape, similar folk art.

One of my biggest inspirations is the symbolist movement.

They sort of took the inherent meanings of different imagery and animals and biblical characters and mix 'em all together to kind of put together a new statement and that, that's what I kind of feel like I like to do.

Zoba is, is actually about artificial intelligence.

Zoba is a giant robot clown toy.

It's not so much a, a commentary on artificial intelligence and the, the, the dangers of it.

It's more how we interact with it and saying, that's really important.

We need to think about it.

It's sitting down and it's a staring through a scope into his hand and that that hand is perfectly sized for a human to come down and sit, lean into and look back up the scope.

And it's sort of saying that, you know, artificial intelligence, it, it, it does have its capacity to learn quickly and, and give us these answers, but what it's learning about humanity is it's learning how we treat one another.

That that's how it, it's going to learn to be human.

And if, if it does wind up destroying us, it's kind of our fault.

- For two years now, we have been working together to create this amazing project and I'm really excited for our community to experience it.

- I like to start as dreamy as possible and then figure out how to make the impossible possible.