Caroline Walker: Janet

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’.