Fife artist Caroline Walker’s take on art and motherhood comes to DCA, sitting alongside work by Tracey Emin.
DCA’s current show arrives as a coup for the Dundee-based arts centre. From London’s Hayward Gallery, Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood includes major names such as Margate, Kent’s Tracey Emin and Portuguese painter Paula Rego.
Another featured artist, though, hails from Courier Country. Born and raised in Dunfermline, Caroline Walker made her name in London.
She has since returned to Fife’s south coast – taking on a derelict 18th century steading north of Inverkeithing.
Caroline comes home to Fife
Having lived down south for 14 years, in 2022 Caroline moved back with her architect husband to seek more space for work and their growing family. “We had quite a good set up, but my studio and our flat were all very small,” she explains.
“We had one child, wanted to have another one and the opportunity to do a building project up here seemed something that wouldn’t be available in London.
“My career was established enough that I didn’t have to be there all the time and I suppose we wanted family support for our young children.”
Family focus for Fife artist
Anyone familiar with Caroline’s success may already be familiar with her family members. Care and female labour, both paid and unpaid, have become important inspirations.
Her children, Daphne, aged two, and five-year-old Laurie often appear, as does the artist’s mum Janet.
Caroline attended Queen Anne High School, Dunfermline, before Glasgow School of Art and London’s Royal College of Art. She fondly remembers how Janet encouraged her creativity.
“From an early age I was crazy about drawing, while I have lots of memories of mum taking me to Kirkcaldy Galleries and the National Galleries [of Scotland, Edinburgh],” she says.
“She got me some oil paints when I was 12 and that was quite exciting.”
Caroline’s passion for paint
With those first pigments, Caroline copied images of what she fondly calls “fancy ladies”, the captivating subjects of historical portraits by painters such as Gainsborough, the Scottish Colourists and Glasgow Boys.
While her subject matter has developed, the artist has stayed with a medium seen as unfashionable when she arrived at Glasgow in 2000, though later came back in to vogue.
“When I started art school, nobody was painting, apart from maybe a couple who’d be totally abstract,” Caroline says. “I definitely didn’t feel like one of the stars of the year. Though by the time I graduated, painting was having a bit of a moment.”
While artists such as the Belgian Luc Tuymans showed paint could still be relevant, Caroline was sticking to her guns, she reveals: “I like how immediate paint is: you want to put a mark down and there it is. You can quickly describe the world around you.”
Fife artist made women central to her work
Later on, while studying for an MA in London, Caroline began to find her calling by thinking back to those “fancy ladies”. She explains: “Almost all those historical paintings l’d enjoyed were painted by men.
“That was the start of me more consciously deciding to make work about women’s lives and what I could bring to that.”
Since then, Caroline has presented several series on women in the workplace – including one on the Little Bugs nursery, Dunfermline, that her daughter attended.
Some proceeds from sales of those works paid for an art studio she opened there in November.
Her homemaker mother – now a cherished grandparent – became the subject of a 2020 show at Edinburgh’s Ingleby Gallery.
Major exhibitions and a documentary for Caroline Walker
Her still life of feeding bottles in the DCA comes from a series made about her sister-in-law Lisa, while this spring Caroline has earned a prestigious retrospective exhibition at The Hepworth in Wakefield, West Yorkshire. This includes a documentary about her also to be shown at DCA alongside a Q&A with the artist.
Being filmed over three years has been an awkward, though rewarding, experience, Caroline admits. “Watching the rough cuts felt overwhelming,” she says. “They captured the most intense period of my life.
“My career has really taken off, but we’ve been through pregnancy and this big building project. I think there’s a connection between motherhood as a subject and the circumstances in which I was making the work.”
Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood runs at DCA until July 13, Caroline Walker: Women’s Work film and Q&A July 3.
Conversation