Ingrid Pollard was born in Georgetown, British Guiana (now Guyana) in 1953 before moving with her family to England when she was four years old. Pollard defines her work as ‘a social practice concerned with representation, history and landscape, with reference to race, difference and the materiality of lens-based media’. With a successful teaching and exhibiting career in the UK, in 2019 she was chosen by Zanzibar-born British artist and curator Lubaina Himid CBE to receive a BALTIC Artists’ Award and was also awarded the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award; her work is represented in UK public collections including Arts Council England, Tate Britain and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Photographer, media artist and researcher, Ingrid Pollard was born in Georgetown, British Guiana (now Guyana) in 1953 before moving with her family to England when she was four years old. She began taking photographs as a teenager, using her father’s box camera to capture the woods and sewage works in the Lee Valley, in east London, as part of an O-Level Geography project. In the late 1970s and early 1980s she began working with the Lenthall Road Workshop, a community-based, feminist screen printing and photographic workshop, in Haggerston, Hackney, supplying images to magazines such as Spare Rib. She subsequently became part of a constituency of British artists who championed black creative practice, becoming a founder member of the Association of Black Photographers (now Autograph ABP), and showcasing her work in group exhibitions such as Black Women Time Now at the Battersea Arts Centre (1984), The Thin Black Line at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (1985) and D-Max (1987) at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. She graduated from the London College of Printing with a BA in Film and Video in 1988 and from Derby University with an MA in Photographic Studies in 1995. That same year her work was included in Self-Evident at the Ikon Gallery.
Pollard defines her work as ‘a social practice concerned with representation, history and landscape with reference to race, difference and the materiality of lens-based media’ (Ingrid Pollard website). ‘Through a combination of photography, text, found objects, printing, and personal photos and letters, she examines narratives of journeys travelled and stories told, deconstructing received ideas of identity, ownership, borders, and subjectivity along the way’ (Ella S. Mills, On Those Shores But in These Shoes: Ingrid Pollard, Mousse Magazine, July 2021). Pollard’s work frequently uses traditional landscape imagery with portraiture, to explore deeply ingrained social constructs, national identity, and grand narratives of history, as well as issues of migration, family and home. She is motivated, too, by the history and mechanics of photography. Just as the work invokes comparisons to the English landscape 'masters' J. M. W. Turner and John Constable, so does it reference early photographic pioneers such as Peter Henry Emerson and William Henry Fox Talbot (Ella S. Mills, July 2021). Her photographic series such as Pastoral Interlude (1988) and Self Evident (1995) depict black figures in typically British rural settings while the series Oceans Apart (1989) features archival images of people in England, Guyana and Trinidad in which the Atlantic Ocean becomes both a physical and a psychic space.
Pollard has worked as an artist in residence with a number of organisations, including Lee Valley Regional Park Authority, London (1994); Towner Gallery, Eastbourne (1994); Cumbria National Park (1998); and Croydon College of Art (2011). From 2005 to 2007, she curated Tradewinds2007, an international residency exhibition project with an exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands, the same year in which she was awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship Award. In 2016 she was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society and received her doctorate-by-publication from the University of Westminster. In 2018 she was the inaugural Stuart Hall Research Fellow at the University of Sussex. The following year she was chosen by Zanzibar-born British artist and curator Lubaina Himid CBE to receive a BALTIC Artists’ Award and was also awarded the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award. In 2022 MK Gallery in Milton Keynes and Pollard were joint recipients of the prestigious Freelands Award for a major solo exhibition in 2022; Pollard was also nominated for the Turner Prize in the wake of this show and other recent projects. She has also held numerous teaching positions, including as a lecturer in Photography at Kingston University. Ingrid Pollard lives and works in London. Her work is represented in UK public collections including the Arts Council England, Tate Britain and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London and Cartwright Hall, Bradford.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Ingrid Pollard]
Publications related to [Ingrid Pollard] in the Ben Uri Library