Barbara Walker: Place, Space and Who | Turner Contemporary | Margate
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.
Thank you for taking photos so that we can follow you into this exhibition (while being in quarantine). The artist is unknown to me and I always love to see new to me artworks.
I find her portraits keep the viewer at a distance as the depicted people’s eyes do not cross the gaze of the observer. They are in an undefined space and time. This is even enforced in my view by the ephemeral quality of charcoal sketches. On the other hand, all portraits are made with so much detail, that it for me shows a special fondness for her subjects, it adds warmth (although this is a very imprecise description)… I followed you link and I am very drawn to the series of artworks ‘vanishing points’ and ‘louder than words’.
That's interesting, I hadn't noticed that the gaze was always towards someone or something else - like the viewer is immaterial. I agree with you ... epheremal and tender. They are enormous in real life, several times life size. I had some other pictures with people in, which gave a sense of how large they are, but I preferred these which, the first two were taken from above and the third one is about ground level.
The light in that gallery is extraordinary. I've been there several times and you get fixated by it.
I thought you would like vanishing point :)