Barbara Walker
Barbara Walker MBE is a British artist based in Birmingham. Across her celebrated career, she has developed a prolific oeuvre of figurative paintings and drawings that ‘tell contemporary stories, hinged on historical circumstances.’ (Artist’s statement, 2020). Among her best-known bodies of work is Shock and Awe (2015), an exhibition of drawings for Midland Art Centre, Walker reflected on the erasure of Black servicemen and women in the British Armed Forces from 1914 to the present day. Produced as the world recognized the centenary of World War I, Walker’s images depicted members of the British West Indies Regiment and the King’s African Rifles in that conflict and the contributions of women from the Caribbean and West India Regiment during World War II.
In these works, drawn from archival material, the artist re-presented histories that have been undermined in no small way by the myth of the Windrush-era as the beginning of a Black presence in an otherwise mono-racial nation. Acts of erasure registered through the gallery space, from the works on paper to the largescale works drawn directly onto the walls, with selected figures delicately excised from their surroundings, leaving stark white shadows of forgotten soldiers. Walker took up similar themes of memory, history, visibility and representation in Vanishing Points, an exhibition at the Jerwood Gallery in 2018, for which she turned to art’s histories to produce a series of works that took up the representation of Black figures in historic works within the British national collection.
In her most recent exhibition of work, Place Space and Who (Turner Contemporary, 2019-20), Walker shifted her focus to the present to create large-scale portraits of five women and girls from the African diaspora living in Margate and its environs. Drawing on the traditions of portraiture within Western art histories that formed the focus of Vanishing Points, here Walker played with themes of self-fashioning and the ways in which notions of belonging are intimately bound up in questions of space.
