Study for Home Visit

Celebrated for her portrayal of near-voyeuristic intimacy, Caroline Walker creates painterly mise-en-scènes that expose the diverse socio-cultural experiences of women living in contemporary society. By drawing on her own photographic source material, Walker provides a cinematic window into the lives of the real women she documents. This blurred boundary between fiction and reality is key to Walker’s work—film has long been one of her primary influences. In Study for Home Visit, hazy tones created through the application of dabbled oil paint depict a woman holding a cadmium-yellow shopper, her left hand outstretched towards a glass door. Set at the perimeter of the subject’s own home, her arrival or departure remains ambiguous, while the work alludes to Walker’s preoccupation with gender-orientated spaces and encounters. As the artist states on the occasion of her two-person exhibition Laura Knight & Caroline Walker: A Female Gaze, at Nottingham Castle, 2022, 'from the anonymous to the highly personal, what links all these subjects is an investigation of an experience which is specifically female'.

By offering both an immersive insight and an intimate vantage point, Caroline Walker positions herself amongst an historical lineage that stretches from the Dutch Golden Age to the incidental realism of Manet and Degas, and the intimism of Vuillard and Bonnard. Walker’s work has recently been exhibited at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; Southbank Centre, London; Midlands Art Centre, Birmingham; and KM21, The Hague.