Artists Nikki Walker and Darya Bing met working on TV commercials. Drawn together by their love of art they now create beautiful scarves, sarongs and prints for their company, Walker & Bing.
Nikki
I produce TV commercials and was creating content for Tourism NZ and Darya was working for them as well. I always loved working with her; she’s got a great sense of style and we kept saying for years we’d love to do something together.
I have always adored scarves. My grandmother was super stylish with the most incredible outfits and she always looked amazing as she always wore beautiful scarves. It doesn’t matter what you’re wearing, you can put on a scarf and you feel lifted. You can actually wear a work of art and I just love how it makes you feel. Fortunately, Darya felt the same and that’s what we set out to do and eventually we found someone who could help us make them.
We have ended up having slightly different roles as I’m pretty good with the digital side of things and Darya is amazing with marketing and dealing with people. Everybody knows Darya and everybody loves her. Although we’ve ended up doing slightly different things, they cross-pollinate well.
One of the things that attracted me to Darya is that I always find her really calming. She’s also really kind, and an incredible cook. She’s very giving to her family and others and I trust her implicitly. We make each other laugh and we’re really prepared to listen to each other, which I think is really important.
It has been so good to find someone who has a similar aesthetic and I rely on Darya for her curatorial ability. What I love about what I create and what Darya creates and what we’ve created together is that we’re constantly inspired. We may not have spoken for a week or so and then we remember how good it is when we’re talking about our work and the possibilities. We have so many ideas we just need more time in the day to create and get everything out there.
I’m very fortunate to have work in creating commercials but I really look forward to my creating and hanging with Darya; it really is my happy place.
Darya
Nikki and I met working on TV commercials for Tourism NZ. We travelled all over New Zealand and became friends as we realised we had a lot of common interests, especially around art and design and most importantly human behaviour. For me it’s that connection that I make with a person to understand that they are on the same page when it comes to values, morals and just being human.
We kept saying it would be great to come up with something that is creative and our own and we wanted to create something that is beautiful to look at and carries a lot more than just being another product.
We both create equally and we sit down together and always end up in agreement around what artwork will work well in the collection. We’re both used to working with people and are very open to understanding and letting other people have room in the process.
I think most of it though comes from the fact that we’re both quite playful and unpretentious. We want this to be fun, we want it to be beautiful, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously.
It’s quite remarkable because we’ve never sat down and had different roles written down for each of us, but it’s very apparent that I take care of anything to do with photo shoots and styling, while Nikki does a lot of the digitizing as she knows how to do that really well.
Nikki is very talented and very funny. She can also be matter of fact and thoughtful and all those qualities come together really nicely. She loves flowers. A lot of her designs are very floral and lovely. We bring very different things into Walker and Bing and she definitely brings the florals!
I come from a very different point of view around art which is very abstract but I find that we are both fascinated about finding the commonality around our differences. We come from very different upbringings, have different types of art that we love but we are always very open to seeing what can we find in common, which is really nice.
