Barbara Walker's Page

Website

WWW.barbarawalker.co.uk

Member type

Artist

If you're an artist, what kind of art do you make?

Digital, Drawing, Painting

About my artwork

The work addresses the personal, social and political implications of the controversial powers of the police stop and search act. Living in Birmingham, I am witnessing at first hand a curious and potent collision of several different factors. Birmingham has for decades upon decades been a very multicultural city, though more recent influxes have served to add layer upon layer to that multiculturalism. And Birmingham was of course the location of the horrific and traumatic fatal shootings of innocent teenage girls, not long ago. As with other cities, ‘gun crime’ and ‘drug crime’ have become, to varying degrees, much more prominent. And Birmingham is a city in which the police have, for whatever reasons, made extensive use of their ‘stop and search’ powers. As a parent, an artist, and a life-long resident of Britain’s second city, I was keen to produce a new body of work that took as its starting point these disparate factors, as they impacted on the life of my son.


Between the period of 2002 –2006 and aged between 17 and 21years old, my son Solomon was subjected to being stopped by the police on several separate occasions. On each occasion, he was asked a series of questions and searched. As now apparently required by law, at the end of the encounter he was presented – by the police - with yellow A5 duplicate copy of an official form relating to the stop and search. Curious about these incidents affecting and involving my son, I began to collect these carbon copies. As an artist whose practice has, for some years now, sought to document the lives of Birmingham’s Black community, I wanted to find ways in which I could address, within my artistic practice, what has been happening to Solomon on the streets of his home city. The resulting work analyses the events and the almost ritualistic procedure of stop and search. The work I’ve produced will, I hope, pose this question: given that my son has, apparently, while going about his lawful business, given the police ‘suspicions’ and given that these ‘suspicions’ have led to him being stopped and searched on a number of occasions, what are the consequences and the implications of being a young Black male in British society today? Furthermore, what informs this curious negative stereotype that insists that young black men are somehow perpetually ‘suspicious’ and worthy of police scrutiny? What is it that apparently makes them such a threat to society or community? To me, as a mother and an artist, the crumpled yellow bits of paper given to my son Solomon at the end of his encounters with the police symbolise these questions. Likewise of course, the crumpled yellow bits of paper have in their own ways come to reflect and represent Solomon’s own frustration, anger and above all fear.

The centre of the artworld is

nowhere and everywhere

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