How would you paint your mother?
Caroline Walker: 'Janet' at Ingleby Gallery
The eponymous subject of Caroline Walker’s first solo exhibition with Ingleby is her mother Janet, who features in each of an impressive series of oil paintings. Over the course of a year, Walker took pictures of her mother in the Fife home where she spent her childhood. Janet is seen engaged in the various daily tasks that lend each painting its title: she makes fish cakes; hoovers; changes pillowcases; lays a table; irons a tea towel.
Caroline Walker, ’Janet’ exhibition at Ingleby Gallery
Documenting Janet as occupied and capturing her unawares, Walker keeps the viewer at a distance from her mother. Although captured in domestic settings that are often intimate (a bedroom, a bathroom), when looking at Walker’s paintings you remain totally aware of your position as onlooker, someone on the outside looking in. We become flies on the wall in Janet’s home, unremarkable and unknown in the face of the large and lustrous vistas of her domestic life. The exploration of women in private, domestic spaces and the nature of gaze is characteristic of Walker’s practice. However, openly placing someone very close to her within this same visual dynamic adds a different dimension to the gaze that is considered.
Caroline Walker, Changing Pillowcases Mid Morning, March, 2020, oil on linen, 190 x 240cm
By creating a distance between Janet and her lookers-on, Walker nudges us to question the relationship between painter and subject, and between mother and daughter. We are forced to ask ourselves; how would I photograph my mother, and why? Janet looks distant and occupied, which at first glace perhaps implies a kind of remoteness. In an audio clip that accompanies the exhibition, Walker explains that in some of the paintings she approaches Janet like she would any other subject, ‘from quite a voyeuristic vantage point’. She continues: ‘quite a lot of the time we were chatting, or gossiping about people, or my mum was telling me to hurry up because she had something else to do’.
Caroline Walker, Tucking In, Late Evening, March, 2020, oil on linen, 200 x 265cm
This feels at odds with compositions that imply distance between artist and subject, but any dissonance is soothed by Walker’s navigation of light and colour. She captures her childhood home affectionately: where Janet is seen indoors, the paintings radiate the warmth that inhabits a comfortable and gently lit home in the evening.
Together, the stills of Janet make up a narrative, telling ‘the story of this house and this person’. Their collective effect is intimate. Hinted at are the identities and stories that underlie the menial or ordinary, furnished with the tender glow of a mother-daughter subtext.
‘Janet’ is on at Ingleby Gallery by appointment until 19th December 2020.
Words: Alice Keeling