Caroline Walker: Janet

About

Caroline Walker (born Dunfermline, Scotland, 1982) has become known for her striking canvases of women, specifically of women at work. These fragmented narratives, glimpses of women going about their lives in both public and private environments, begin as photographic snaps (often taken covertly) which are later worked up into lustrous, luminous oil paintings. They are sometimes playful, but can also be challenging, documenting the myriad social, cultural, economic, racial and political factors that affect women’s lives today.

In exploring this hinterland of human experience Walker offers both an intimate insight and a voyeuristic vantage point. As Marco Livingstone puts it ‘much of the effectiveness of Walker's paintings arises from the fact that as a spectator one is simultaneously looking into other people’s lives and putting oneself in their place’.

In this first exhibition with Ingleby, Walker turns her attention close to home, presenting a series of paintings where the focus is the artist’s own mother, Janet, as she goes about her daily tasks; cooking, cleaning, tidying and tending the garden of the Fife home where the artist spent her childhood.

A book, illustrating all the works in this series (with an introduction by the critic Hettie Judah) will be published coincide with the exhibition.