For over a decade, Caroline Walker has painted the unseen labour of women – shopkeepers, maids, manicurists. With her new solo exhibition at The Hepworth Wakefield, she turns the lens on herself and her family, charting the rhythms of early motherhood, from the quiet moments at home to the institutional spaces that shape maternal care
Caroline Walker gave birth to her first child, Daphne, just before the UK entered its first COVID lockdown. While she remembers that period as oddly peaceful – “It gave us this quiet time to become a family,” she says – it also exposed a lack of support for new mothers. Face-to-face appointments were replaced with phone calls, family visits gave way to Zoom screens, and much of the work of early parenthood unfolded in isolation. This disorienting, personal experience would shape what has become her most intimate body of work to date.
For over a decade, Walker has painted the experiences of women living in contemporary society. Her subjects have ranged from manicurists and hotel maids to shopkeepers, who are caught mid-task and absorbed in the rhythms of their work. With Mothering, however, a new solo exhibition at The Hepworth Wakefield, Walker’s gaze has turned inwards. Rooted in her own experience of early motherhood, the show brings together five years of work and marks a shift from the observational to the autobiographical. Intimate oil sketches, monumental canvases, ink drawings and preparatory studies chart the invisible infrastructure of maternal care – from the institutional spaces of labour wards and nurseries to the tender moments of postpartum life. It is a tender and unflinching collection of artworks that asks: who do we picture when we think of care, and who is left unseen?
When Walker dials in over Zoom from her studio in Dunfermline, Scotland, she’s in the converted stable block of a derelict farm that she and her partner restored. The mother of two moved three years ago with her family, leaving behind 20 years in London for a home closer to where she grew up. “I do like it,” she says, her voice warm but measured. “It’s really nice being near my parents – and they’re quite handy from a babysitting point of view.” Behind her, works in progress lean against the walls. Some belong to The Holiday Park, a new series for Grimm Gallery in New York, while others are headed to The Hepworth Wakefield. “The subject is a family-friendly holiday park we spent a week at last summer,” she says, adjusting the camera slightly to reveal glimpses of the scenes she’s captured: housekeeping staff preparing cabins, chefs moving through busy kitchens, entertainers applying makeup backstage, the fluorescent blues of a swimming pool. “It’s all women at work, but laced into the family experience of being there.”
Walker’s fascination with women’s lives – both in the private and public sphere – can be traced back to her childhood. “I didn’t clear up my studio in London properly until last spring,” she says, “and there was a folder of things from when I was at secondary school. I was looking through it and laughing at the fact that, basically, I haven’t really developed. I’ve gotten better at making paintings, but the things I was drawn to are so similar.” Even as a child, her sketches were filled with women, often engaged in acts of care or domestic work. Some of her earliest subjects were of her mother, Janet, who’s pictured tidying, cooking or simply moving through their home in Scotland. “That house was very much my mum’s life project, and I’ve since made that the subject of a body of work,” she says, referring to her 2020 series Janet. “It took me until my mid-30s to really reflect on how much of a presence she was, watching her engage in these acts of care. That very gendered role was something I absorbed without even realising it.”
Growing up, the division of labour in Walker’s household was traditional – her mum stopped working when her brother was born, and her dad was the breadwinner who was often away for his job. “My mum was very much in charge of the domestic realm.” She describes her childhood as happy, but recalls knowing early on that she wanted something different for herself. “I could see my other friends whose parents both worked, and I knew I was lucky that my mum was always there. But at the same time, I remember thinking, ‘I’m not going to be like that when I grow up. I want to be glamorous. I want to be a fancy lady.’” Decades later, with a five-year-old and a two-year-old of her own, she laughs at the question of whether she ever became that glamorous figure. “No,” she says, shaking her head with a chuckle. “Very much cleaning the kitchen several times a day, clearing away all the detritus.”
Before having children at 37, Walker studied painting at Glasgow School of Art and at the Royal College of Art in London. She spent over a decade building her career, showing work at various museums such as Kunstmuseum in The Hague, K11 Art Foundation in Shanghai and Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh. Her paintings are also held in major collections including the Tate, Arts Council Collection, the UK Government Art Collection, ICA Miami and the National Galleries of Scotland. “I had a long stint of getting to be that ‘fancy lady’ – building my career as an artist, having an identity that was really separate from being part of a family unit. Now I feel like I have both of those things.”
As Walker’s life and circumstances evolved, so too did her work. “I’m constantly switching between the role of a mum and then back into the studio to try and do some work,” she says. “But of course, the kids are coming in and out all the time. It’s all rolled into one.”
It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that her family became a central figure in this new phase – and therefore the works involved in Mothering. The 2021 series Daphne, which is named after her daughter, began when Walker started observing the patterns of her own home life during the pandemic: mothers manoeuvring around their London neighbourhood; the women working at the local bakers; shopkeepers, nursery staff and key workers keeping the world moving. The titular painting, and first from this series, ‘Daphne’, shows her daughter gazing at the television, her small frame silhouetted by the warm twilight of their living room. It’s cinematic and intimate, appearing like a freeze-frame from a family film that no one besides them has seen. This was the first time she’d painted her own kin in this way. “So much of that lockdown experience, for me, was of being with a very young child,” says Walker. “It opened the door to my own family and personal experiences becoming part of the work itself.”
Following Daphne, Walker completed a residency in the maternity wing at University College Hospital, the same department where she had given birth to her daughter. The project had originally been commissioned by University College London Hospitals Arts and Heritage in early 2020, but was delayed due to COVID. When it finally resumed in 2021, she was given access to labour and postnatal wards, where she’d shadow midwives and observe women at various stages of childbirth and recovery. “Having had a break and being a year-and-a-half or so into having a child, I was able to approach that subject matter with a bit more objectivity,” she says. “When I went back to UCH, I found there was an odd combination of subjective and emotional feelings attached to that space.”
The resulting series, Birth Reflections, includes three large-scale canvases. ‘Theatre’ captures the charged intensity of a C-section delivery, where masked surgeons and midwives work under the stark glow of operating lights. The scene is clinical and human, the staff swathed in blue scrubs as they move with precision, while a newborn is gently tended to in an incubator. ‘Ultrasound’ depicts a sonographer focusing on a screen as a masked patient lies under dim lighting, the glow of the monitor illuminating their faces; ‘Birthing Pool’ portrays a woman mid-labour in a softly lit room. A partner crouches beside her, holding her hand, as the midwife observes from a distance, the water reflecting the tension and tenderness of the moment. Inspired by Frederick Cayley Robinson’s Acts of Mercy – a series of works commissioned for Middlesex Hospital exploring themes of care, resilience and heroism – Walker approached the project with a calm, observational eye, allowing the atmosphere of each room to guide the viewer. The tension of pre-labour, the stillness of medical care, the intensity of recovery.
Around the same time, Walker commenced work on a series about her sister-in-law, Lisa, and her experience of new motherhood. She had her first child in 2021, and over four months – one before the birth and three after – Walker documented Lisa at home, capturing the soft, exhausted, domesticity of postpartum life. ‘Night Feed’ (2022) and ‘Refreshments’ (2022) are two standout works from this series, which show her seated in dim light, surrounded by the debris of daily care: feeding bottles, half-sipped drinks, muslin cloths, crumpled blankets. Like with all of her works, Walker took hundreds of reference photographs ahead of painting these pieces, searching for moments that carried both emotional and compositional weight. “I rarely approach a painting in isolation: I think about how each piece interacts within a series – how it tells a larger story.”
‘Sticker Dolly Dressing’, another painting involved in Mothering – and one of Walker’s personal favourites – captures a portrait of her own mother and daughter at the kitchen table, absorbed in a sticker book. Daphne is two and a half in this painting, and she’s five now. She had curly hair, but it’s now straight. “Painting these moments crystalises the memory of them,” she says. There’s also a small, rare self-portrait of Walker and her son, Laurie, when he was six weeks old. “Every time I look at it, I get the sensation of remembering what his little body felt like when he was that small, how light he was. It’s easy to forget what they were like when they were that age.”
Mothering, then, is a story about care, and who provides it. Influenced by Hetty Judah’s Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood – a pivotal book that addresses the absent mother from art history – Walker was drawn to the title “mothering” as a way of acknowledging caregiving beyond biological parenthood. “I wanted what’s being portrayed in the show to be about different forms of mothering,” she explains. “Yes, we’re seeing the very new mothering of women who have just given birth, but we’re also seeing this mothering relationship of midwives and doctors passing on knowledge and care to new mothers.” This extends to the role of nurseries and childcare workers – those who, after moving to Scotland, became ever more prominent in her life. “We’d gone from an inner-city nursery with no outdoor space to one that was basically in a woodland,” she says. The move inspired ‘Morning at Little Bugs’ (2023), a painting that captures women working in the outdoor nursery. “As with nearly all early-years childcare provisions or services, the health visitors and medical professionals that work in the maternity ward are women. It was an overwhelmingly female workforce.”
This is a particularly poignant message considering that motherhood has been historically tethered to biological ties and domestic duty, reinforcing traditional gender roles. In many societies, mothers were primarily seen as caregivers, their work largely confined to the home and often undervalued. Over time, however, motherhood has evolved alongside broader social changes – industrialisation, feminism and shifting family structures have all contributed to a more complex and expansive understanding of what it means to mother. Walker’s work captures this transformation, revealing a more nuanced and typically unseen labour of care.
“I feel very lucky that being a mum no longer feels like a penalty to being an artist,” Walker says. “And I think that’s actually relatively recent.” She admits she hesitated for years to have children, unsure what it would mean for her career. “By the time I did, there was enough momentum that taking time out wasn’t going to derail everything.” She also credits her partner’s equal involvement as crucial. “It’s a real partnership,” she says. “That makes a huge difference.”
Still, she recognises how far things have come. “Even 15 or 20 years ago, it was rare to see women artists with families. It felt like you had to choose. Now it feels like people are more interested in the reality of women’s lives – not just the work, but the life around it.”
Caroline Walker: Mothering is on view at The Hepworth Wakefield until 27 October 2025, find out more here
This article is taken from Port issue 36. To continue reading, buy the issue or subscribe head here
