For most of her life, Barbara Walker has poured her anger about political and personal events into her art. “When I’m trying to understand something, I turn to my work; it feels cathartic,” she says. “Maggi Hambling said your art should be your best friend. Those words really resonate with me.”
Creating art helped her when her son, Solomon, was being repeatedly stopped and searched by Birmingham police as a 17-year-old; the difficult period inspired a series of pieces, Louder Than Words, combining portraits of the teenager with reproductions of the handwritten police tickets issued to him. The absurd pretexts cited by West Midlands police for stopping him are painstakingly reproduced: “Seen acting suspicious, pointing at bar staff through window.”
Working helped her process her fury again, four years ago, when she embarked on Burden of Proof, a hard-hitting group of portraits highlighting Home Office cruelty towards the Windrush generation, which was shortlisted for the 2023 Turner prize.
But recently she has been funnelling more positive emotions into her work. Visitors to Walker’s mid-career show at the Whitworth gallery in Manchester will enter a room wallpapered with what initially appears to be a traditional blue pastoral toile de Jouy design. On closer examination, however, it is revealed to be a radical subversion of the form, featuring vignettes of Windrush-era arrivals to Britain: Caribbean nurses being trained, bus conductors at work, exhausted travellers resting on their suitcases.
This new work, called Soft Power, is determinedly upbeat and a deliberate balance to the Turner prize-nominated work. The wallpaper also features portraits of six Manchester-based, first- and second-generation Windrush migrants, placing the Caribbean diaspora, she says, “visible, validated and centre stage, where they belong”.
“Burden of Proof looked at institutional racism, and the damage that was caused to those individuals,” she says. “I was dismayed by what I saw, quite upset, hurt and angry. After the emotional fallout and collapse, there’s the feeling of the rise of the phoenix. I immediately felt that I needed to respond to it. I wanted to create another body of work that is more celebratory, honouring these people. It’s going to create a sense of room, home, warmth and intimacy; it speaks to the classic, iconic images of the Caribbean front room.”
Walker was disheartened recently to be asked: “What does it feel like to have all this exposure after being in the wastelands?” As she prepares to open this powerful show, it is true that she stands in the full beam of a newly intense spotlight. What she objected to was the questioner’s casual dismissal of her earlier career. “I found that very offensive, because I’ve never been in the wastelands,” she says.
Walker, 60, is a contemporary of the Young British Artists of the 1990s: Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas. She acknowledges it has taken her longer to secure the public recognition that came so swiftly to them when they were in their 20s, but points out she has had an exhibition every year since graduating. The body of work included in her show in Manchester is spectacular: thought-provoking, wide-ranging in its ideas, experimental in form and in places simultaneously beautiful and distressing. Walker says she is happy to have been able to pursue her own ideas for so long.
“I haven’t had that exposure, that spotlight, but what is success? I think success is getting up each day and making a decision to create something, expressive or imaginative or innovative. I’ve taken that choice and stayed focused,” she says. The advantage of doing things relatively quietly, she adds, is that “you can get on with it without any pressure”.
When we meet, Walker is actually under a certain amount of pressure; she makes time to talk during a break from drawing vast, ceiling-to-floor-sized charcoal portraits on the gallery walls, as she recreates her Windrush piece Burden of Proof. This work, juxtaposing portraits of five people who were misclassified as illegal immigrants with the brutally worded official documents questioning their immigration status, will be erased from the gallery walls by Walker at the end of the exhibition, in private.
Creating the huge portraits is physically exhausting and then removing them, destroying her own work, is an emotional process. “It’s an intense ritual. Washing the wall echoes these individuals’ lost lives and their aspirations, dreams, memories that were taken away.” This time, removing the portrait of one of the subjects whom she worked very closely with, Anthony Williams, will be particularly painful. Williams, a Jamaican-born former Royal Artillery soldier, was wrongly classified as an illegal immigrant by the Home Office 42 years after coming to Britain; he was plunged into extreme poverty and his life unravelled catastrophically. He died prematurely and unexpectedly earlier this year aged 61. Walker cries as she remembers him.
“It really broke my heart. He lived in a flat without heating, without food. They are victims or survivors, but when I portray them there’s a sense of dignity and empathy. There is a lot of strength in them,” she says. “He was very low and angry when I met him. He had had enough of British society.” The choice of charcoal, a fragile medium, seems to reflect the precariousness of these individuals’ status and their vulnerability to erasure. “It’s how the audience wants to interpret it, but it’s quite loaded.”
Initially, Walker did not expect a mainstream British public gallery to display it. Burden of Proof was first shown at the Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates, which attracted the Turner prize nomination. “I was pointing the finger at society and at a system, and I was a bit unsure about where the work could be shown,” she says. “I thought it was too much of a hot potato.”
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She was struck by how people responded to the piece when it was in the Turner show at the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne. “There’s a quietness I’ve noticed when people come into the room. People stand back and then they come up close to the work. It’s meant to mentally disarm you.”
The child of Windrush migrants who came to Britain from Jamaica in the 1960s, Walker has remained in the same area of Birmingham where she grew up. “There was a lot of art around me; I was exposed to a lot of creativity. In the 1970s there were a lot of black Britons expressing themselves through visual arts, music or literature.” She describes her late mother, a nurse, as her biggest inspiration. “As children we were encouraged to make things. We were drawing or finding spare pieces of throw-away to make a go-kart or a kite, it came naturally.” She remembers one teacher – Mr Lewis at Heathfield primary school, Handsworth – who “identified I had certain skills. I remember him praising my efforts. I never forgot that feeling.”
Walker studied art in her late 20s, after having a family. She notes that art school gives students a training in visual language, but does not prepare them for the complicated process of trying forge a career. “I found it difficult to fit into any groups. I felt at the time there wasn’t much attention for mature students, and also I was working in painting and drawing, whereas back then, there was a strong emphasis on sculpture, installation and new media,” she says.
“After art school you’re left with this piece of paper; the thing that art school never prepares you for is the rejection, the constant rejection, and how you deal with that and build yourself back up.” Her “tenacious and very strong-minded” personality helped her. “I make work either way. This is my vocation, but it’s also something I enjoy. I wake up each morning and I think about art. I go to bed and I think about art. It never stops. It never leaves me. No one’s ever had to say to me: ‘You should be working.’ I’ve always just found the motivation.”
Her son Solomon is happy that Louder Than Words will be shown again in Manchester, Walker says. “He feels very proud of the work now. In the beginning he wasn’t – he was very conscious of being noticed, and of this being presented for all and sundry to see when he was just on the brink of adulthood,” she says.
Walker looks back and thinks she was depressed when her son was being stopped by police. “I was a young mother. I felt that I couldn’t protect him.” He is now in his 40s and no longer gets stopped. “But it carried on for years. There’s never a day goes by that I won’t wonder if he’s OK.”
This is not a retrospective, she says, reluctant to see the exhibition as a sum total of what she has to offer. “It’s an introduction, so an audience can see how I’ve started.” There is no question as to whether or not there will be more work to come: “There’s so much more to say.”