Broken Angel: Barbara Walker

March 3rd - June 12th 2022.

Barbara Walker began developing the ideas for her work in the Broken Angel project over the winter of 2020-21. During the pandemic, she was acutely conscious of her immediate family, from whom she was, like so many of us, isolated for long periods. As an artist she wished to address the ways we were responding to isolation, loss, being unable to touch and hold each other; but also how we found comfort through finding connection and love.

In the summer of 2020, she had been part of a public artistic response to the pandemic. For the South Bank Centre’s project ‘Every Day Heroes’, she made a powerful image of her daughter, an NHS nurse. This was both a loving gesture to a member of her family, and a symbolic tribute to the thousands like her in care roles.

As we began discussing this project at Coventry Cathedral, another more art-historical conversation began alongside this personal context. How often do we identify the saints and angels of traditional iconography by what they are holding or shown alongside ? Barbara has also explored in other work the presence and absence of Black figures, including in depictions of Biblical stories. Do we imagine the saints and angels of the Bible and other texts as real, corporeal beings or as abstracted, according to our own backgrounds and identities?

Personal and spiritual meanings

Barbara did not expect us to ‘decode’ what these objects meant in a specific way, any more than we could read a text in the book John Hutton’s missing angel was holding, or ask the saints and angels what gifts they gave or special things they possessed themselves as they moved through the world.

Instead, we were asked in what way each thing might tell us something about the spirit that lay behind them; and what we may offer ourselves as ways of representing an everyday way to reach the comfort, solace and joy that we have come to realise means so much to us.

We were asked to consider the personal meanings of these objects in an open, positive spirit of association. It is important to know that the book is a much-loved copy of the Qu’ran. Barbara’s daughter owns more than one copy, and this is one worn by everyday use, while her others are special pristine copies kept carefully at home. It stood as an image of the comfort and joy found in faith, and in the Cathedral’s inter-faith context, a way of linking people of different faiths through a shared experience.

These objects also spoke to us in the way that the symbols across the West Screen’s figures might. They may have prompted stories, memories and personal empathy, and they allowed us to ask – how would I describe my story, my sense of comfort, joy and peace, through objects that were personal to me?

In a deeply moving irony, as we installed the work we were also following the news of conflict, disruption and the plight of people in Ukraine. Images and reports add a new immediate layer of meaning to our associations with what personal possessions people hold close, and resonate with other moments of dislocation and loss for people impacted by armed conflict.

Artist Bio

Barbara Walker was born in Birmingham and continues to live and work in the city. Her work is informed by the social, political and cultural realities that affect her life and the lives of those around her. These directly shape a practice concerned with issues of class and power, gender, race, representation and belonging.

To find out more about Barbara and her work, including current and upcoming exhibitions, please visit her website.