Barbara Walker, MBE, RA is:
a British artist based in Birmingham in the UK. Her work is informed by the social, political and cultural realities that affect her life and the lives of those around her. Growing up in Birmingham, her experiences have directly shaped a practice concerned with issues of class and power, gender, race, representation and belonging. Her figurative drawings and paintings tell contemporary stories hinged on historical circumstances, making them universally understood and reflecting a human perspective on the state of affairs in her native Britain and elsewhere.
I recently went to see her exhibition “Being There” at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol. It’s on until 25 May and if you can get there, I think you should. It’s very powerful and it shows what’s possible with pencil. (Also charcoal, paint and print, but mostly pencil.) It really made me start to think about how I could do more with my art.
There are several parts to the exhibition. First of all, I looked at a series of drawings called Burden of Proof. These are large portraits of people affected by of the Windrush scandal. The portraits are beautifully and sensitively drawn and laid on top of enlarged reproductions (drawn) of documents they needed to use to prove their right to live here. The pictures bring home the inhumanity of the system, contrasted with the very human portraits.
Next there is Louder than Words, which includes some portraits of Walker’s son, Solomon, drawn in top of blown up reproductions of the dockets he received having been repeatedly stopped and searched by the police. There are also pictures referencing Jean Charles de Menezes a completely innocent young man who was shot by the police, with more pictures of Walker’s son.
I’m a white middle aged man who grew up in sleepy rural Dorset and my experience of life has been completely different and very privileged. I don’t think I’m completely ignorant of what life is like for people in this country who aren’t white, who aren’t men, or who aren’t my age. At least I hope I’m not. But I also think I need to see art like this, and art like this needs to be made. The portraits are so sensitive and the message is so strong. What good art can do is help you feel what otherwise can be quite a theoretical concept.
I’m not going to write about every part of the exhibition but I want to mention one more section. In Vanishing Point Walker faithfully copies, in graphite, old masters, but only the parts with black subjects. The people usually in the background of the painting, who you don’t often notice. The remainder of the picture is shown only as embossed paper. It’s very clever and, like everything in the exhibition, thought provoking.
This is the first contemporary exhibition I’ve seen that has used figurative art in such a profound way. So much of contemporary art is about paint being thrown around, or clever ideas rather than technical skill, and that’s all great, I love most of it. But what I like to do myself is draw and it was just wonderful, and moving, and challenging, and inspiring, to see how drawing can be used so powerfully.