Through figurative drawings and paintings, Barbara Walker explores issues of race, gender, identity, class, power and representation in both historical and contemporary contexts. Foregrounding marginalised perspectives, her works engage with archives in order to reconstruct narratives of national histories and challenge the memory of colonial empires. Shortlisted for the Turner Prize 2023, Burden of Proof (2022)—a series of eight large-scale portraits overlaid with hand-drawn facsimiles of original documents sourced from personal and public archives—reflects on the exclusion and xenophobia exposed by the 2018 Windrush Scandal in the UK. ‘Windrush’ refers to the name of the ship that carried hundreds of men and women from the Caribbean to the UK in 1948. Initially invited to work in the sectors affected by Britain’s post-war labour shortage, these individuals and their descendants were later required to justify their continued residence in the UK. Walker presents documents such as invoices for legal services and temporary certificates of discharge from the military to highlight the struggle for legitimacy faced by Black diasporas.