'"New Hampshire was where I first met him," remembers Nicola Green, "he wanted to see my sketchbooks because I was right at the front and I was drawing.

"And I said no! I said 'you wouldn't want to show me a half-written speech'. He laughed."

Obama won the election, and like visitors to Washington's Library of Congress or New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, he will be now have seen Nicola's finished work.

Now In Seven Days - the story of his ground-breaking campaign realised through seven symbolic screen prints - is set to receive its European premiere at the Walker Art Gallery from Friday.

The artist created the works (Light, Struggle, Hope, Change, Fear, Sacrifice/Embrace and Peace) from six trips to the US during the autumn '08 battle for the White House.

But the genesis of the project was in 2005 when the then Illinois senator visited the UK, meeting politicians including Nicola's husband David Lammy.

"I was pregnant with our first son, and his story captivated me," she explains. "As a mother I started thinking and looking for mixed-race role models for my children."

Three years later, Obama announced his challenge and Nicola, now pregnant with her second son, met Michelle Obama in London.

A request to join the campaign trail saw the artist travel to rallies and meetings in places like Colorado, New Hampshire and Philadelphia.

"Persuading them for me to be there was really hard," Nicola says. "There were a lot of late-night phonecalls."

The result is not a story of Democrats verses Republicans, she's keen to point out.

"I was interested in how it could inspire my children and their generation, and what they could learn from it," she says.

The meeting in Denver, where Obama accepted the Democratic nomination in front of a crowd of 70,000 was "electrifying" and gave rise to the first image in the In Seven Days sequence, Light, which shows hands doing a giant global Mexican wave.

Nicola says: "It was at that point I actually realised this was a bigger thing than just a portrait of one man, that it was all of our story."

Now that story is being told in Liverpool, with the exhibition opening days before Obama's second inauguration.

Choosing the city for the European premiere was something of a no brainer for the grand-daughter of a Liverpool businessman.

In 2008 Liverpool was also having its own big cultural moment, while ironically it's a painting in the Walker - George Frederic Watts' Hope - that inspired a sermon by Obama's pastor Jeremiah White which in turn inspired the future president's book The Audacity of Hope.

Hope is also the title of one of the prints, being exhibited alongside Nicola's sketches, photographs (she took around 2,500 in total) and campaign ephemera.

It's only really now, four years on, that she's started talking about the experience.

"I made the work very much so I thought about all the things that were coming up in the future," she says. "When he steps down there will be a different reflection on the time and therefore the work."

In Seven Days..... is at the Walker Art Gallery from Friday until April 14.'

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