Caroline Walker in her studio with Repose (2022).
Photo: © PETER MALLET; © CAROLINE WALKER
Artist to Watch: Caroline Walker Puts Focus on Female-Dominated Work in Poignant Paintings
The artist's work is featured in a solo exhibition at Grimm gallery New York through May 3
Scottish artist Caroline Walker’s new body of work started with a holiday. “I went for a weekend at Center Parcs,” she says of the UK-wide chain of family-friendly resorts, “and I came away thinking it would make a great subject for paintings.” It wasn’t the guest experience she was interested in, however, “but all the labor that goes on in the background,” particularly the efforts of women, a popular subject for the artist.
In 2016, Walker made a series of paintings depicting London nail salons, which led her to focus on other female-dominated occupations like nursing and childcare, as well as subjects closer to home, including her mother cleaning her house and her sister-in-law Lisa looking after her newborn baby. “The shift between paid and unpaid labor is something I’ve been thinking about a lot more over the past few years through my own experience of having young children,” says Walker.
The artist’s 2024 work Cabins at Dusk.. Photo: COURTESY THE ARTIST, GRIMM GALLERY AMSTERDAM/NEW YORK/LONDON, INGLEBY GALLERY, EDINBURGH, AND STEPHEN FRIEDMAN, LONDON/NEW YORK
The artist's 2024 work, Glass Wash. Photo: COURTESY THE ARTIST, GRIMM GALLERY AMSTERDAM/NEW YORK/LONDON, INGLEBY GALLERY, EDINBURGH, AND STEPHEN FRIEDMAN, LONDON/NEW YORK
The results are tender and poignant snapshots of daily life, their realism counteracted by a loose and luminous painterly style. Her latest canvases are destined for a solo show in New York, which opens at Grimm gallery on March 28. “The Holiday Park” is based on a collaboration with two Parkdean Resorts in the south of England, which Walker photographed last July.
“I took my family with me partly because I thought they would enjoy it, but they also got roped into being subjects in lots of the paintings,” she says of the series, which brings together women toiling away—from front-of-house staff to the evening performers—and children at play. One of the new paintings will also be part of “Mothering,” an exhibition looking at the past five years of Walker’s practice, which opens at the Hepworth Wakefield in Yorkshire, England, in May.
A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2025 Spring Issue in the section “Artists to Watch.” Subscribe to the magazine.
Cover: Caroline Walker in her studio with Repose (2022).
Photo: © PETER MALLET; © CAROLINE WALKER
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