Ingrid Pollard is a British media artist and researcher who has developed a social practice concerned with representation, using portraiture photography and traditional landscape imagery to explore social constructs such as Britishness or racial difference. While she became known for her photographic series, she has also throughout her career been uncovering unseen and hidden histories in a variety of practices from printmaking, drawing, mixed media and film.

Ingrid Pollard: Carbon Slow Turning situates Pollard’s practice in a wider context and weaves together her personal story and Caribbean heritage with broader narratives of post war black settlement and photographic history. Continuing the theme of exposing what is hidden, Pollard challenges in her works the representation and derogatory portrayals of the ‘black figure’.

For four decades, Pollard’s important photographic collages have offset traditionally idyllic representations of Britain with unseen legacies of xenophobia and exclusion. Pastoral Interlude (1988) places the Black figure within an imagined picturesque setting, undermining perceptions of ‘urban’ and ‘authentic rural’. Seaside Series (1989) combines cyphers of coastal tourism with stories of historic and contemporary immigration to the UK. More recently, Seventeen of Sixty-Eight (2019) documents how the African body is represented in popular signwriting.

Despite Pollard’s work being held in several national collections and discussed in every publication on black artists in Britain, the artist is little known to the general public. There is no doubt that her practice and achievements are nationally significant and this first monograph seeks to widen her exposure.