The Boxing Diaries

Sarah Walker

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The Boxing Diaries is an intimate series of paintings with dead flat spaces and heavily impastoed figures documenting the travails of the artist’s two sons as they train and compete as young amateur boxers from 2009 to the present day.

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The images portray the drama inside the ring. The interaction between fighter and trainer and the patient waiting of a mother ferrying her children to meetings around the country. Here the joy of watching dedication and success in her own is bittersweet as this is a violent sport and, inevitably she witnesses her children getting hurt.

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Sarah Walker writes:

"The paintings are about parenting, youth training and respect between trainers and youth engaged in a sport with a specific culture. They are about the social, cultural and physical distance between the background of a parent growing up in Dublin 4 and the life of teenagers growing up in West Cork with a huge interest in a sport not available in their home area, the achievements of a couple of trainers and a group of young boys coming from a relatively tiny club in Bantry with the longest distance to travel of any of their opponents."