Being Here 

Barbara Walker

The Whitworth, Manchester 

4 October 2024 – 26 January 2025

Review by Peter Kalu

Barbara Walker has kept on down the road she chose back in the 1990s. She has retained fidelity to her primary technique – drawing – and to her primary theme: the black presence in Britain and its under-appreciated contribution to the national story. Walker makes detailed drawings of her subjects as a political act, The detail is a counter to stereotype:  each drawing is about a life – a person not a statistic, cipher or symbol. Her drawings – in graphite and charcoal – are monochrome, giving a quality of timelessness to her portraits. She uses a tracery technique – delicate branching of the pencil and charcoal stick.

In her large-scale British Empire series of drawings, Shock and Awe (2015-20), based on photographs of soldiers serving in the West India Regiment and King’s African Rifles during World War I, Walker picks out black figures glimpsed in the margins of archival war photographs, and, using a white-out masking technique, re-centres them, inviting the viewer to see them as the main characters in their own stories and the nation’s.

In the History of Western European Art series, Vanishing Point (2018-ongoing), a similar technique is used to bring black figures who sat on the periphery of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century paintings to the fore. The figures remain compositionally at the edges, but with the dominant white European subjects inked out (in the way that a tattooist can ink out a bad tattoo) or left as ghostly, embossed presences on white paper, what remains is the thing that was kicked to the edges. The viewer is now free to appreciate that hitherto peripheral figure, to move them to the centre of consciousness. The cry may go up from a traditionalist viewer, ‘But you’re ruining this, why can’t you leave the picture as it is?’ And Walker’s answer, the radical black answer, evident in her drawing, is that the original was always only a partial narrative – the original painting diminished our story, and my adjustment is a necessary correction. Get used to it.

The exhibition includes a series of portrait paintings (as opposed to drawings) in which we see ordinary black people going about their lives: shopping, at church, at the barbers, playing dominoes, getting their hair braided in the living room. These portraits avoid traditional poses. The subjects are seen on their own terms; mostly they ignore the artist. One young man stares boldly back at the viewer, chin up, gaze between defiance and slight hesitation. This series captures the individuals but is also a social commentary, a documenting of the times. 

In Show and Tell (2008-15), a mix of oil paintings and drawings, young black men adorn their bodies with clothes and jewellery, haircuts, necklaces. We see everything but their faces. It creates a weird sense of male vulnerability beneath all the flash and bling. Louder than Words (2006-9) documents the Stop and Search procedures Walker’s son has been subjected to over the years, using official documents wielded by the police force such as their  ‘producer’ letters and overlaying these with portraits drawn directly onto the documents. Your youngster is in the Barbara Walker exhibition, on a wall somewhere, with his friend. 

Burden of Proof (2022-3) is the series for which she was shortlisted for the 2023 Turner Prize. She uses a palimpsest technique to contrast the flesh and blood of the Windrush generation elders (who are being forced to prove their entitlement to remain in the country they served for so long) with the pedantry of British paperwork. Questions are being asked: which is more important, the documents or the people? Was their sacrifice honoured? As part of this series, Walker has drawn directly onto the walls of the Whitworth: four large, charcoal portraits of this Windrush generation, portraits which will be erased at the end of the exhibition by Walker herself.

If there is poetry in Burden of Proof, it is the poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson: the reverberating tone is Inglan is a bitch. The portraits convey a sense of the black British subjects being trapped between exile and accommodation; the accomplishment of migration by the Windrush generation came at the cost of an abrasion that the drawings make visible in the eyes of the elders. Here in the UK, their lives, like their portraits, have been made incomplete, understated, erasable.

Walker’s most recent work, Leda and the Swan (2023), is placed like an endnote at the point in the gallery where you leave. A self-portrait posed against the black and white skeleton of an arch-necked swan, the artist is in a red dress, the colour of which fades from blood red at the top to black and white at bottom. The defiantly composed image invites us to consider how this might apply to the post-colonial black British presence. 

https://www.whitworth.manchester.ac.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/upcomingexhibitions/barbarawalker/

Peter Kalu

Peter Kalu is a Manchester-based short story writer, novelist, storyteller, playwright and poet.