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Over the past ten years Caroline Walker (b.1982) has become well known for her paintings of women, specifically, women at work in all manner of circumstances from the domestic scenarios of her own lived experience to more detached encounters in shops, cafés, offices and hotels. There’s a lineage here that connects to the domestic interiors of the Dutch Golden Age as well as to the everyday realism of Degas and Manet, the intimism of Vuillard and Cassatt, and the awkward voyeurism of Hopper.

Whatever the context, Walker’s work offers the viewer a momentary glimpse into womens’ lives, quietly revealing the complexities of their place in contemporary society as fleeting fragments of often invisible female labour take centre stage. Hers is a position of careful observer, drawing to our attention the often-mundane work that is instantly familiar, yet frequently unseen.

Walker was born in Dunfermline, Scotland, and went on to study at Glasgow School of Art and at the Royal College of Art in London. In 2020, Ingleby presented a solo exhibition, Janet, with the artist. For this exhibition, Walker created a body of paintings where the focus was the artist’s own mother, cooking, cleaning, tidying and tending the garden of the house in the Scottish town where the artist spent her childhood. She has recently moved back to Scotland and for this, her second exhibition at Ingleby, has made a new body of work that turns its focus onto the rhythms, routines and everyday intimacies of family life at home in Fife.