Place, Space and Who looks at the experiences of five black women living in the Kent town

An artist who spent four months recording the experiences of black women and migrants in Margate came face to face with racism in the seaside town that will play host to the Turner prize later this year.

Barbara Walker relocated to Margate for a residency that allowed her to take over one of the Turner Contemporary’s galleries – a light-filled, cavernous space with floor-to-ceiling windows that look out over the Kent coastline. Although the room faced outwards over the North Sea, Walker decided to use the commission to look inward and explore race, migration and modern Britain in the form of five imposing portraits of black women, all of whom have moved to the local area.

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“Birmingham and Margate both voted to leave the EU,” says Walker, who admits it was that connection that drew her to the seaside town. “I really didn’t know what to make of it – it’s not a rural space, it’s not an urban space, it’s a different space.”

Drawn using charcoal and chalk, the portraits includes a young, recently arrived asylum seeker from Eritrea, and a generation-spanning group of women who moved to Margate from major British cities, including London. Walker interviewed the group about their experiences living in the town, which is 97% white and voted 63.8% in favour of leaving the EU in the Brexit referendum.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest One of the images from Place, Space and Who by Barbara Walker. Photograph: Stuart Leech

Walker decided on the medium after seeing racist slogans written in chalk while she exploring Margate. “I was confronted with graffiti and some of it was racist,” says Walker, who had work featured in the Venice Biennale in 2017. “I wasn’t expecting it: you’re walking along a beach, which is peaceful and calm, and then that hits you. Something as beautiful as [chalk] is used to make something like that. This is a response.”

Walker said the situation didn’t faze her and if anything made her believe she was in exactly the right place for a piece that explored race and modern Britain. “We are living in disturbing times, it’s almost as if we’ve gone back 20 years,” says Walker.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Margate: ‘not a rural space, it’s not an urban space, it’s a different space’. Photograph: Ann Stevens/Getty Images/EyeEm

The artist says the rise of the far right and her own experiences of growing up in the UK when racial divisions were front page news in the 1970s and 1980s, inform her work. “I grew up during the rise of the National Front; when Enoch Powell was spouting his rhetoric and it’s come full circle again. It’s quite disturbing for this generation and for future generations, so I think it’s important to challenge these issues. I try to tackle issues that people might not necessarily want to discuss.”

Walker was born in Birmingham, left home by 14 and had three children by the time she was 21. She describes herself as a “hustler” who had to be creative to make ends meet but always harboured a desire to be a full-time artist. “I didn’t fall into the role of an artist,” says Walker, “it was planned”. Inspired by figures including Sonia Boyce, Claudette Johnson and the black arts movement of the 1980s, in her late 20s she went to university in Birmingham and got a first-class degree in art and design, before slowly building a career based on intricate figurative drawing.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Place, Space and Who explores migration and the experiences of women living in Margate. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

The work she is most proud of was an exhibition that focused on stop and search, and was inspired by her son’s experiences of being stopped by the police in Birmingham. “That work came from the perspective of a parent, it was happening in the world but it was also happening to me and my son. My son was just walking to work and he was stopped.”

Walker says curators told her to tone down her work in order to appeal to a wider audience and avoid being marginalised as a “political artist”. She ignored the advice: “I can’t be producing nonsensical topics when people are dying, when black men are dying in police custody,. I find it hard to make pretty pictures. I’m interpreting the world around me and pushing against the grain.”

The art world will be confronted with Walker’s portraits when the Turner prize exhibition is held in Margate this autumn, and it’s a meeting the artist is looking forward to. “Someone said, ‘Your work will fit in when the Turner Prize opens,’” says Walker. “I told them, ‘No, the Turner Prize will fit in with me,’”

“That little white space represents a lot,” adds Walker, speaking about the gallery. “I wanted to disrupt it. And I am.”

Barbara Walker: Place, Space and Who is at the Turner Contemporary until April 2020