Barbara Walker Sub Urban: New Drawings

Abstract

British artist Barbara Walker makes drawings of people. She makes drawings of people using charcoal and a soft pencil. She makes drawings of men and women; huge, larger than life, floor to ceiling drawings rendered directly onto the wall. Each fold, crease, line, and blemish of her sitters’ bodies and the clothes that enfold them are sensitively transcribed in the smallest of detail. But we never see her sitters’ faces. And each wall is wiped clean at the end of every show. It is impossible to view Walker’s work without first being astonished by the sheer scale and by the craftsmanship, by the quality of lines seemingly etched into the wall, or the paper, or the canvas, creating a three-dimensional, almost sculptural effect. It comes as no surprise that she sites Giacometti and Rodin as amongst her influences. Yet these soft charcoal and pastel drawings are deeply political. In Walker’s hand the methodical making of lines on a wall and the erasing of them is a form of quiet activism. The article published here features drawings from the 2015 exhibition Sub Urban staged at the James Hockey Gallery, Farnham, Surrey, in which Walker examined contemporary stereotypes through the study of the dress codes and fashions adopted by young women.

Keywords:

• fashion
• dress
• identity
• subcultures
• youth
• women
• drawing
• portraiture
• African Diaspora
• Barbara Walker

Notes

1. Christine Checinska interview with artist Barbara Walker, August, 2017.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christine Checinska

CHRISTINE CHECINSKA

Dr Christine Checinska’s creative practice as an artist/writer/curator examines the relationship between cloth, culture and race. The cultural exchanges that occur as a result of movement and migration, creating creolized cultural forms, are her recurring themes. She is currently an Associate Researcher at VIAD (Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre), University of Johannesburg. In 2016, she delivered the TEDxTalk Disobedient Dress: Fashion as Everyday Activism and installed her solo exhibition The Arrivants at the FADA Gallery, University of Johannesburg. Her publications include Crafting Difference: Art, Cloth and the African Diasporas in Cultural Threads: Transnational Textiles Today, Jessica Hemmings (ed) Bloomsbury Publications, 2015, and At Home with Vanley Burke, Image & Text, No. 29, 2017.

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