Computer animation on monitor, b/w, silent 
1.3 sec (animation) 
101.5 x 60.5 x 14 cm (monitor)

All we know of Kiera in This is Kiera Walking is that she is a slim woman in a short black dress. Her figure is drawn in thick black outline against a blank background. All she has for a head is a perfect circle. Julian Opie's portraits of his friends seem, at first glance, to reduce them to the most basic ciphers for men and women, hardly more individualized than those featuring on street signs, instruction leaflets or modular toys like Lego. All Opieworld is like that, whether civic building, motorway, farm animal or landscape, operating, on one level, as visual esperanto for generic concepts such as 'church,' 'sheep,' 'office building' or 'tree'. Yet, for all their simplicity, each of Opie's icons have an unexpected specificity to them. Although his motorway paintings, for instance, are minimal in the extreme, as a sequence they seem to refer to a specific memory of driving. In his durational portraits, like This is Kiera Walking, Opie shows how we identify individuals as much by their particular manner of moving as by their facial features, body type and dress sense.
(Alex Farquharson)