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In 1986 a group of London-based filmmakers, the Black Audio Film Collective, made what proved to be a seminal film that examined the broad historical background and the aftermath, of the “riots” that had flared up in inner city Birmingham in September of the previous year. The rioting – apparently triggered by community discontentment and sparked by an altercation between police officers and members of the public - rocked not just Birmingham itself but also London’s political establishment. The film, Handsworth Songs, is an engaging document that consists, in part at least, of an overlapping series of archival images and contemporary footage of the streets of Handsworth and the surrounding neighbourhoods. One of the most disturbing aspects of this contemporary footage is the way in which areas such as Handsworth are shown as being, in effect, territory which is occupied by the police, as much as it is occupied by regular people going about their normal day to day activities. This sense of Handsworth and surrounding areas being virtually under siege by the police is reinforced, time and time again, by newsreel and by the recounted experiences and opinions of aggrieved and frustrated residents. Within Handsworth Songs we hear from a variety of Black Brummies who are sick and tired of being perceived as drug peddlers and other criminals, and who resent the intrusive, disruptive and aggressive policing that they feel targets them.
Enter Barbra Walker, who has for this exhibition produced a body of work that unflinchingly and intelligently explores the impact that stop and search has had, and continues to have, on her son, Solomon, as well as on herself as a mother. Barbara is one of the most talented, productive and committed artists of her generation and over the course of the past few years she has established and distinguished herself as an important chronicler of the lives of her family and her community in and around her native Birmingham. Her work – painting and drawing – is marked by its profound empathy for its subject matter as much as its distinctive style. There is, within her pictures, great honesty, an honesty that speaks of (as well as to) the human condition in many of its forms. Like the great African American artist Charles White, Barbara’s pictures are “images of dignity” and because her work is highly figurative, we all have an uncommon access to its multiple and pronounced social narratives.
‘Louder Than Words’ consists of a series of deeply arresting (no pun intended) drawings that directly address the personal, social and political implications of the police obsession with stopping and searching those hapless young Black men deemed to be suspicious in appearance or behaviour. As a parent, an artist, and a life-long resident of Britain’s second city, Barbara has used her formidable drawing ability to explore the impact of stop and search on her son Solomon who has, on a number of occasions been stopped by the police, questioned and searched. To this unwarranted act of intrusion and aggression was added the curiously modern and thoroughly bizarre act of being issued with a record of the stop and search. It is now apparently required by law that at the end of a stop and search encounter the time waster presents the one whose time is being comprehensively wasted with a duplicate carbon copy of an official form relating to the stop and search. For Barbara (perhaps even more so than Solomon) these small, almost unassuming and sometimes barely legible pieces of crumpled paper took on a sinister life of their own. Humiliation and intrusiveness reduced to obligatory rituals of bureaucratic form filling and box ticking. It’s difficult to know just what those stopped and searched are supposed to do with these souvenirs. Curious about these incidents affecting and involving her son, Barbara began to collect these carbon copies issued to Solomon. As an artist whose practice has, for some years now, sought to document the lives of Birmingham’s Black communities, Barbara wanted to find ways in which she could address, within her artistic practice, what was happening to her son on the streets of his home city.
The full version of the above text was published in the brochure to accompany the exhibition 'Louder Than Words' by Birmingham-based painter Barbara Walker. The exhibition was at Unit 2 Gallery, London, November 18 – December 16, 2006.
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