4/92 Wallis Street, Raglan, Waikato 3225
022 475 1141
Wanda Barker
“The story of the painting is sometimes in the text, behind the layers, part exposed, part hidden. Sometimes the text is the painting and the mark making and adornments, secondary.” – Wanda Barker
A long time social activist, social worker and therapist, retired now, the big disasters of climate and war injustice and injustices against women and the natural world infiltrate my work. I hold some blistering righteous anger at men, CEOs in positions of power, who’ve feathered their nests, that could’ve done something politically over the years and haven’t.
I rage against injustice and the silencing of women who are outspoken – misfits, imprisoned, loud, critical, vexacious, creating, demanding a better deal for women and children, protesting women, women who are disobedient, women who tell the hard truth of political, emotional, physical, sexual abuse in their lives, their daughter’s, their mother’s lives.
I rage against the difficulty of both telling women’s stories, and of having them seen, heard, felt enough to make change. Abuse in the home, the workplace, systemic violence against women.
I rage against destructive bystanders, who’ve seen it and know all, but do not tell – those who align themselves with the abusers, not the abused.
I am telling these stories in my art making.
We knew forty years ago, the abuse and neglect of our waters, animals, birds, the whenua, of women, of difference, of vulnerable elderly, disabled and children, would bite, and it is. We have not done enough and I am tired of yelling, so I yell in my paintings.
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4/92 Wallis Street, Raglan, Waikato 3225
022 475 1141
hello@thewharfgallery.com