Barbara Walker at Turner Contemporary

I have mentioned the work of Barbara Walker before, and there is now a chance to go and see her work in the flesh because she has a residency at Turner Contemporary in Margate. I think the way that she deals with the ephemeral and the need to give gravitas to people that are seldom given much thought is very interesting. She draws directly on the walls of the spaces that she is exhibiting within. These drawings are often simply wiped out at the end of the period of exhibition. The process of removal being as poignant as the process of construction. The people she often chooses to draw are found on the edges of society, which makes their rubbing out feel so tragic. However the fact that when she is drawing them, she gives them a monumental size helps to redress the balance. For a while at least their status is elevated and their presence made strong and unavoidable, as they step out of the margins and take a command of the gallery space. I have mentioned the conceptual possibilities inherent when making drawings with unfixed charcoal before. There is a temporality that is very fragile in an unfixed charcoal drawing, Barbara Walker is obviously very aware of this and the fact that these are in effect 'dust' drawings, and charcoal is itself a burnt stick. 'Ashes to ashes, dust to dust' being perhaps the underlying poetic sensibility of these images.

This is how the gallery introduces Walker and her work.

"Place, Space and Who is a new commission by British, Birmingham-based artist Barbara Walker, which explores migration and the experiences of women living in Margate.

Walker will create a series of large-scale wall drawings directly onto the gallery walls, during a four-month residency in the space. From the 30th April 2019, visitors will be able to see the artwork evolve and grow.

Over 20 years Walker has developed a practice of drawing, painting and portraiture, often creating large-scale drawings directly onto walls. Growing up in Birmingham her experiences have directly shaped a practice concerned with class and power, gender, race, representation and belonging. Her figurative paintings and drawings are informed by the social, political and cultural realities that affect her life and the lives of those around her."

For more information see Turner Contemporary 

See also

Drawing and politics part two

Cecily Brown's Shipwreck drawings at the Whitworth

I was over in Manchester this week and finally had a chance to catch up with the Cecily Brown Shipwreck drawings exhibition at the Whitworth. The exhibition is on until the 15^th of April so those of you thinking of going to see some drawings over Easter could easily fit this exhibition in.

The drawings were framed in deep set box frames and glazed behind glass, so please forgive the quality of the images, it is always hard to avoid light reflection when trying to record things behind glass.

Cecily Brown is a very interesting artist, in particular because of her often quoted desire to work in that gap “where figuration and abstraction meet”. She is in this instance working from a series of old master paintings, all of which address the horror of death at sea. Her practice could be described as a deconstruction of the past in order to re-imagine images for today. Her paintings come out of an iterative process of drawing and re-drawing from selected images from the past, a process she continues until she is able to internalise the information taken from the pictorial constructions she is confronting.

 She attempts to bring an old tradition of history painting back into the present tense by interrogating figure relationships, highlighting selected rhythmic passages and the way line can cut through colour in different compositional variations or by exploring how marks can re-energise themselves when uncoupled from the preciseness of the original contours of form.

Gericault: The Raft of the Medusa

Delacroix: Christ Asleep During the Tempest

Delacroix: The Shipwreck of Don Juan

The images she has drawn from are very familiar; Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa of 1819, Delacroix’s ‘Christ Asleep During the Tempest’ of 1853 and ‘The Shipwreck of Don Juan’ from 1840. These paintings being not only icons of French Romanticism but perhaps still of resonance because of the fact that the continuing migrant crisis keeps us aware of tragic deaths at sea.

I have tried to deal with the subject myself and realise how difficult is to make images that resonate with a contemporaneity and yet at the same time tap into the deep roots of human history. Brown’s approach is to do this by trying to find the motion of being in a rocking, wave tossed small boat in the movements of people, and to find these movements in classical paintings. The artist is trying to extract the human tragedy from these images by focusing on how bodies shape themselves as they engage in tragic events. According to the British Red Cross, approximately 5,000 asylum seekers arriving in the UK each year are resettled in Greater Manchester, and from my own experience when talking to refugees arriving in Leeds many of them will have at some point have had to cross the Mediterranean in small not very sea worthy boats.

Cecily Brown has stated that her drawings are an alternative “way of approaching a deeply difficult subject”.  Subjects of this sort are emotionally charged, and sometimes it is useful for an artist to tap into the resources of history in order to avoid simply hand wringing or emotive bluster. The references to other lives at other times in many ways giving gravitas to her response and providing a network of connections that can help an observer come to terms with a continuing aspect of the human condition.  

Cecily Brown: Shipwreck painting

 Link to an earlier post on Drawing from the old masters

See also:

A post thinking about drawing water that includes a short animation of a migrant boat at sea