Barbara Walker presented in our final artist talk of the year with her fluid work, responding to the world around her. This technique gives her a unique way into the painting and drawing that looks at the social and political.

One of the first works that was shown looked at disabled bomb experts and those who have fought in wars. Walker attempts to look at the ‘true’ perspective, with prompts from conversations, media and daily life. For this, the prompt came from a conversation that asked whether black soldiers can fight on behalf of Britain in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq.

Walker’s collection of works and style looks at the chronology of the past 100 years of war. She doesn’t really like wars, but this was the premise to have a conversation through the artwork. She also finds that she has one foot in history and the other in a contemporary practice. Walker is regarded as a research-based artist (80% research, 20% making), to try and unpick, learn and have a foundation to build and make from.

Not only does Walker look at the past, but she also takes a look at contemporary soldiers. This is a difficult subject and it is touch-and-go when trying to have a conversation about this. Because it is a difficult conversation to have by many, she decided to put that idea aside and look more at the historical aspect, especially of her own, Caribbean, history. Immediately there was a need to know where these people came from, bringing images to the surface and using them, scavenging them from archives. Walkers’ work plays and disrupts the photographs and images that she finds in these archives. She identifies the photograph, buys the file, enlarges through certain formats and then works from these.

Charcoal is one of the preferred mediums for Walker, a medium that she is comfortable with, thus she is able to make a statement and a metaphor because of her interest in the hierarchy of constructs (those she draws are lower in the hierarchy, and charcoal is often considered ‘behind’ painting). Her works look at the individuals claiming the space again, giving rebirth and celebration, but also critically looking at images and re-framing them. You always have to disrupt to make a new, or continue an old commentary.

In some pieces, Walker drew with charcoal directly on the wall, which she has to wash away. In other pieces, she has taken an eraser or white chalk to an area of the piece. Both methods are somewhat aggressive, and make an impactful statement. If things become too familiar, she moves on, to bring challenges to her work and move forward.

Walker also looks at the female contribution as a challenge to her own work and uses the same processes as before. In one image, she may emboss one woman and drew the other two. In others, she will cut out an image which is severe, but also subtle, placing the drawing, or part of the photograph in a different place. These different techniques come together to create powerful pieces of work. A last medium that Walker has demonstrated her skills in is installation, commenting that wars should not be drawn on pieces of paper, but also on the walls in the pavilion where many of these soldiers were stationed. It brings some humanity back to such an ugly word. Walker makes a stand that these people were spoken about but not commemorated, bringing their lives to the surface in a provocative manner – ‘hitting the audience with a sledge hammer’.

John Russell is a lecturer here at the University of Reading and talked to us about his practice in our weekly Wednesday artist talks. His practice grew straight after art school with a group that he was involved with; Bank. They pretended to be in shows with famous people to which they would send terrible colour photocopies of invitations to those in a large gallery mailing list. The galleries that they were advertising to be a part of started to get people to turning up to these exhibitions, despite them never existing.

It fuelled Russell and Bank’s interest in the pitching of an exhibition, when Damien Hurst caught their eye as the pitching of this particular exhibition in a warehouse was one of a kind. This inspired Bank to create their own, real, exhibition in a disused bank. This was almost like an organised party but you had to leave the work up for four weeks afterwards. Here, Russell and Bank continued to spend a lot of time and effort on the invitations because they were up against big name galleries, and this is the one thing that would be used to attract people’s attention toward the exhibition. They were able to do a whole series of exhibitions in disused buildings that were available in the middle of London, and used everything from oversized foam to fluorescent paper for the invites.

Zombie Golf was then born as it looked at the seriousness of the galleries, playing on it. They spent the summer making a golf course, using cast faces of Bank artists and members to put on the zombies. When artists were asked to exhibit, the golf course was already there so they worked around it. Some put up paintings, others allowed their piece to interact and bounce off of the golf game, as this was a working golf course. Some of the paintings were golf courses, specifically painted for this exhibition by Peter Doig, that have recently been sold for over a million pounds. It was at this point that they truly realised they were great at attracting people to their shows, but not at selling their artwork.

This was then the Bank group set up a newspaper as though they were the ‘art world tabloid newspaper’. They were able to pick on people in a funny way, which became relatively successful. This mockery quickly led onto FaxBak as Bank were receiving a lot of press releases from other galleries. Press releases are often nonsense that people think is the effective way of describing art, but Bank would then correct their press releases and give them a mark out of ten before faxing them back from where they came from. Bank even had their own stamp that they would use before sending them back. These were displayed in a pretend gallery in their exhibition space, framed and lined up. FaxBak was also done for New York exhibitions, where the group would receive threats and aggressive replies on answer machines. These answer machine messages were then played in the background of the show in New York, adding to the exhibition. These pieces are now part of the Tate Britain permanent collection.

Russell left Bank not so long ago and moved on to performance and digital work with a concentration on digital painting. He described his work as ‘a Jackson Pollock but made out of meat’. Russell was interested in the way that you can only see a tiny bit of the thing you’re working on when it is digital, with a constant motion of zooming in and out to see the whole. These are printed on large-scale vinyl for impact. Russell realised that he kind of hated them and when he finally sees them printed, they are crude and cumbersome in an inelegant fashion. The work that he produces flicks between heavy handed and spectacular but this intrigues him, and continues to do so as he makes his work today.

Richard Galpin strips photographs to reveal a fragmented set of forms in spatial compositions. His work began with scaffolding, scouring and peeling away the surface emulsion in specific areas to leave only the scaffolding part. This transformed through to rollercoasters, cities and into futuristic spaces. Galpin engages with modernist abstraction, constructivism and futurism, as well as the formality of the photography process. Through this profess, there is a reconfiguration of space where new forms emerge. It is not quite a representation of negative versus positive space, but it certainly leaves you to think.