Barbara Walker is a British Caribbean artist from Birmingham. I'm very drawn to her work, which is often very temporary and drawn directly onto walls with charcoal and chalk, and sometimes washed away at the end of the exhibition.
Two pieces of work that really touch me are Transcended, a series of site-specific, large-scale ephemeral charcoal wall drawings depicting men and women soldiers from the Commonwealth in World War I, and its companion Shock and Awe which concentrates upon the contribution of Black servicemen and women to the British Armed Forces and war efforts from 1914 to the present day.
While I was away visiting family recently, we went to see Barbara Walker's current exhibition at the Turner Contemporary in Margate. The large north facing windows of the gallery, overlooking the sea, bring an ethereal quality to the drawings and their setting.
Place, Space and Who is a commission, created over a four-month residency at Turner Contemporary. It explores identity and belonging, featuring sound and portraits of five women and girls from the African Diaspora living in Margate and Kent.
“For Place, Space and Who I was concerned with what it is to be seen as belonging to a minority group,” says Walker. During the residency, she has connected with women and girls from different generations, both longstanding residents and more recent arrivals to Margate and Kent. The sound piece created in collaboration with artist Dan Scott captures the voices of the sitters, exploring their different viewpoints and experiences of living in and moving to this area.
In this work, and throughout her practice, Walker has drawn on traditions of portraiture in Western art history, attuned to the ways identity and power are reflected in clothing, framing and symbolic objects. These portraits, rendered in charcoal and Margate chalk, are about “reclaiming a space,” says Walker, “they reflect upon the strength and character of women and girls who have been key to establishing this place as home, and their respective contributions through social and cultural gestures – which can be large or small.”
There is another woman included, older, but I wasn't able to get a good photograph of her. I like the drawings, as they are of real women, that you might see or talk to or know. There is a kind of tenderness in their rendition and this is amplified when you listen to the accompanying twelve minute tape of their voices, speaking as they were sitting for their portraits.
Source Barbara Walker in front of one of her portraits at Turner Contemporary.