Kara Walker Grub For Sharks: A Concession to the Negro Populace, 2004 Courtesy the Artist and Brent Sikkema Photograph Tate Liverpool 2004

Project Space presents the work of artists who have been specially commissioned by Tate Liverpool to make work for the ground floor gallery. This is the sixth Project Space and presents new work by one of the most successful African-American artists, Kara Walker.

Walker came to international attention in 1994 with an exhibition at the Drawing Center in New York, which featured room-sized installations of silhouette cut-outs, depicting controversial and provocative themes. Central to her work is Black history, its telling and re-telling, and the effect this has on African-Americans today. She attacks racial myth and stereotypes, exploring issues such as slavery, sexuality, oppression and domination.

For Walker, her use of the silhouette – once used for portraits and caricatures, and primarily a decorative craft – is an effective way of simplifying complex ideas. She likens it to stereotyping, in which individual identities, situations and personalities are reduced and distorted into easily-caricatured forms.

The project was inspired by a work by JMW Turner, Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and the Dying – Typhon* Coming On, and the book Liverpool & Slavery: An Historical Account of the Liverpool-African Slave Trade, acquired by the artist during a research visit to the Merseyside Maritime Museum. 'Grub for Sharks' is a reference to the practice of throwing slaves to their death in the sea, in an attempt to lighten ships before a storm – schools of sharks were known to trail ships for this reason.

Kara Walker was born in Stockton, California in 1969. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1997, she received a MacArthur Foundation Award, and in 2002 she represented the US at the São Paulo Biennale in Brazil. She lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University. This is her first solo exhibition in the UK.

* spelling of typhoon at the time the work was painted.