I first encountered Ingrid Pollard’s photography in a 2017 retrospective of Britain’s Black arts movement in Nottingham – a moment when the aftershocks of the Brexit referendum were still fresh, Trump was new, the English Defence League was on the up and Whitehall officials were describing their vision for Britain’s global relations as “Empire 2.0”. Faced by such a void of political imagination, it felt vital in that moment to look to the work of artists such as Pollard, Sonia Boyce, Keith Piper, Lubaina Himid and Eddie Chambers, who since the early 1980s have been exploring creative ways to stand up to white supremacy from a specifically British point of view. Pollard’s unique contribution to that movement, a beacon for Black engagement with Britain’s rural geography, quickly found a special resonance with me.
Pollard is best known for her work in portraiture and landscape photography. In projects including The Cost of the English Landscape (1989) and Seventeen of Sixty Eight (2019), she questions received ideas of Englishness and brings what Baroness Lola Young has called “simplicity and complexity” to themes of place, race, nation and sexuality.
