CAROLINE WALKER: JANET
For the 2020 Edinburgh Art Festival, gallery Ingleby will present a solo exhibition of paintings by Caroline Walker from 13 June – 12 September 2020 that focuses on the artist’s Mother.
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.
Born in Dunfermline, Scotland, in 1982, Walker 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.
Walker has, ever since studying at Glasgow School of Art and the Royal College of Art, quite consciously sought to explore representations of women in her work, and to do so in ways that not only challenge conventions in art history, but also perceptions and attitudes that are deeply ingrained in our (still!) patriarchal society and manifested throughout visual culture today.
The relationship between women’s inner lives and outward appearances, and the relationship between the physical places in which they spend time and the underlying structures that control these places and hence women’s lives within them, are central to Walker’s practice.
A book, illustrating all the works in this series (with an introduction by the critic Hettie Judah) will be published coincide with the exhibition.
EDINBURGH ART FESTIVAL EVENT
Saturday 1 August, 10.30 am -12 noon
Coffee / croissants / bloody marys
Walker will be discussing her work at 11am
Image credits from top:
Caroline Walker. Bathroom Sink Cleaning, Mid Morning, March, 2019. Oil on board, 45 x 36 cm, 17 3/4 x 14 1/8 in.
Caroline Walker. Watering Sweet Peas, Mid Morning, May, 2019. Oil on linen, 210 x 165 cm, 82 5/8 x 65 in.
Caroline Walker. Planting Decisions, Early Afternoon, May, 2019. Oil on board, 45 x 36 cm, 17 3/4 x 14 1/8 in
Caroline Walker. Making Fishcakes, Late Afternoon, December, 2019. Oil on linen, 210 x 160 cm, 82 5/8 x 63 in.
Caroline Walker. Ironing Tea Towels, Late Evening, March, 2019. Oil on board, 45 x 36 cm, 17 3/4 x 14 1/8 in.
Caroline Walker. Dusting Pictures, Late Morning, March, 2019. Oil on board, 45 x 36 cm, 17 3/4 x 14 1/8 in.
All courtesy of the Artist and Ingleby, Edinburgh
