Barbara Walker Is Just Getting Started

‘I’d rather not use the term “retrospective” because that term feels very complete; there is still so much more to come. I’m more comfortable with the idea of a mid-career survey show because I haven’t even met or reached my peak,’ Barbara Walker told me ahead of her forthcoming show at Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery.  

Though Walker has been a force in the Black British art scene since emerging in the 1990s, the Whitworth exhibition is her first major survey show. It’s an opportunity she did not anticipate – ‘I didn’t come into this space thinking, one day it will be a retrospective or a survey show, or even being a Turner Prize nominee or an RA [a Fellow of the Royal Academy].’ ‘I’m just compelled to create.’

She explains that ‘Being Here’ – the exhibition title suggested by her mentor and dear friend, curator and historian, Eddie Chambers – references her intention to create a show that is immediate, accessible and clear, and which ‘command[s] the space for Black presence and belonging in modern Britain.’

Walker is widely celebrated for expanding the possibilities of portraiture and ‘taking the image out of the white chamber’ – experimenting with painting, blind embossing, mixed media and large-scale wall drawings. Though grounded in her autobiographically-driven explorations of Black belonging in Britain, her grappling with the institutional structures of racism gives her practice a global resonance.

Her series ‘Louder than Words’ (2006) tackles the impact of police stop-and-search practices through the figure of her youngest son, who was consistently targeted by West Midlands Police and searched over 20 times between 2002–06. As a single mother, Walker recounted her feelings of helplessness after her son revealed his experiences. ‘The only way I could work through that was to work with these yellow, crumpled documents that he handed to me. To quietly and neatly pull them slowly apart.’

The series marked a shift in her practice, taking her beyond her studio and into police archives, where she sought out copies of her son’s stop-and-search forms, scanning and enlarging them to use as a backdrop for portraits of him.

In Burden of Proof (2022–23), nominated for the 2023 Turner Prize, Walker similarly found a powerful leitmotif in the form of the critically reinterpreted official document. The series centres on the stories of six individuals impacted by the ongoing Windrush Scandal, where, in 2018, the Home Office demanded that migrants from the Windrush Generation prove their right to remain in the UK, something which had never previously been questioned. Producing portraits on documents used to prove their lawful status, Walker reignites conversations around contemporary manifestations of ongoing racial injustices.

‘In some pieces, the figure is pushing out, trying to survive against the document. There was this chase to find these documents,’ Walker explains, describing the arduous process victims of the scandal have gone through to find paperwork going back decades, ‘and through them, it seems as though the throwaway, forgotten pieces of paper can become the very bureaucratic things oppressing these individuals. I wanted to show that tension between the figure and the document. But they sit side by side and hold each other’s hands.’ 

While Walker’s work is often read through the figures she depicts, they exist in conversation with her love of drawing and attention to material detail. ‘Drawing often gets marginalized or relegated to a secondary position in contemporary practices’, she explains, ‘[but its] accessibility and practicality means that everyone can relate to [it].’ As suggested by the show’s title, her monumental wall drawings using lightweight materials grant her the freedom to work quickly, get under certain shapes, and make figures prominent.

There is a certain tension in the use of erasable mediums to depict marginalized communities. Walker explained, ‘Before making a mark to remove, there’s a quiet, almost melancholic farewell’. Using materials like water, she creates new conversations and drawings through erasure. She finds ‘a contradiction in removing life, history, or stories, because the residue left behind continues to tell those stories: the remnants persist, even if they are no longer fully visible.’

‘Being Here’ marks the end of Walker’s relationship with wall drawings – a familiar yet emotionally and physically demanding practice. ‘I’ve been destroying my works for 12 years, and now there comes a time when every project must reach its endpoint.’

Moving forward, Walker’s new commission, Soft Power (2024), represents a shift towards ideas of reckoning and rebirth. Initially interested in the pictorial qualities of the 18th-century French Toiles De Jouy (a cotton-based decorative wallpaper) she came across in Whitworth’s collection, Walker discovered its role in French colonial expansion. Appropriated from Indian chintz textiles by the French East India Company, the design visually reinforced colonial stereotypes while bolstering the Western economy. 

Celebrating six first and second-generation Windrush migrants from Manchester, Walker’s rewriting of the Toile will lace in patterned portraiture, vignettes and storytelling, predominantly using the colour blue, a colour common in colonial-era ‘oriental’ products, and ‘in the colour spectrum, a pigment that fades more quickly than others. Even though it may not be erased,’ Walker explains, ‘it serves as a reminder of the paths of these stories, and the reference to citizens whose stories are erased over time and reappear.’

To encounter Walker’s work is to be disarmed by her labour of love. ‘Being Here’ will stand as a testament to what is to come, monumentalizing the marginalized by writing them back into dominant versions of history. As Walker says of the exhibition’s title, ‘it’s simple and makes a statement: I am here, or the Black presence is here.’

Barbara Walker’s ‘Being Here’ is at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, until 26 January 2025 

^{Main image: Barbara Walker in her studio, 2022. Courtesy: the artist and Cristea Roberts Gallery, London; photograph: Chris Keenan}