London, United Kingdom
NCS
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In Caroline Walker’s 2022 portray “Bottles and Pumps”, numerous breastfeeding paraphernalia lies drying on a white tray. “That’s been an interesting one, in terms of how people have responded,” she wrote to NCS over e mail, relaying the portray’s reception as a part of “Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood”, a touring group present curated by art critic Hettie Judah. “It was the painting men responded to most when it was first shown (at Stephen Friedman Gallery in London), with (their) memories of bottle feeds or being tasked with cleaning and sterilizing the apparatus in those strange first months with a new baby,” stated Walker.
The work was initially produced as a part of “Lisa”, a sequence of work capturing Walker’s sister-in-law in the weeks instantly earlier than, and three months after, giving delivery.
At The Hepworth Wakefield gallery in the north of England, items from “Lisa” be part of different artworks by the Scottish artist in a serious new solo present, titled “Mothering,” in an intimate survey of early motherhood and the prolonged assist community that helps new moms navigate the expertise — from midwives and cleaners, to grandmothers and childcare staff. The present contains work made throughout Walker’s 2021 artist’s residency at a London hospital maternity ward (“Birth Reflections”) and depicting her younger daughter’s nursery (“Nurture”).
“’Mothering’ felt like an expansive title that could describe acts of care, which weren’t limited to the relationship between biological mother and child, reflecting the wide range of people who become part of our lives in the early years of childhood,” shared Walker, reflecting on the deliberate reframing of how motherhood is characterised and tethering it to the socio-economic buildings of labor she has beforehand studied. “I liked that the term is a verb describing the act of providing care and nurture, rather than a specific identity or fixed relationship.”
The theme of motherhood has been a core focus for artists for hundreds of years, although it is typically with males in the function of the creator, rendering scenes they solely know secondhand. See Gustav Klimt’s “The Three Ages of Women”, or Caravaggio’s controversial “Madonna and Child with St. Anne (Dei Palafrenieri)” — certainly, the various depictions of the Madonna and Child make it maybe probably the most broadly celebrated and incessantly circulated picture in the style of mom and kids in art.
For Walker nevertheless, it wasn’t at all times an apparent material. “Motherhood wasn’t a preoccupation for me, so I wasn’t looking for it in the world around me,” she stated. “I’ve always been drawn to images of women in painting. Some of course were depictions of motherhood, but it wasn’t something I was especially drawn to.”
“My work is very routed in a Western painting tradition and frequently references, directly and indirectly, specific genres,” Walker continued, “but I try to approach these through a contemporary female lens, asking if the perspective of a woman artist can add something different.” In Walker’s personal analysis, she discovered a way of commonality in the work of Impressionist painters Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot; “The Wet Nurse Angele Feeding Julie Manet”, made by Morisot in 1880, in explicit shares a dialogue along with her personal perspective.
“The relationship of exchange that’s at play in the painting really interests me. Morisot is paying another woman to nurture her child, so she can work and make that exchange the subject of the work itself,” Walker defined, referencing the balancing act that has generally been an impediment for girls who’re mother and father, particularly working-class people and people from marginalized communities, usually and likewise inside artistic industries, the place revenue is usually much less secure. “I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between paid and unpaid care and the transactional nature of nurseries and paid childcare, a service we rely on as a society and which I myself utilize.”
“Mothering” then, in title and content material, stretches the everyday narrative and asks the viewer to revise how we would think about motherhood to be introduced creatively, constructing on the huge visible library constructed by ladies artists during the last century. Louise Bourgeois for instance, whose “Maman” sculpture lately returned to London’s Tate Modern, incessantly interrogated concepts about motherhood and maternity in her work, whereas Alice Neel typically painted moms and their youngsters knowledgeable, in some half, by her personal understanding of the connection (in an early piece from 1930, she fused her personal story with the Virgin Mary’s, producing “Degenerate Madonna”).
In pictures too, these roles and the related rituals have recurrently been a automobile for expression, from Carrie Mae Weems’s “Kitchen Table Series”, that includes a mom and daughter make-up session, to Rineke Dijkstra’s “New Mothers”, whereby the photographer documented ladies and their hours-old newborns. In 2020, the American photographer Maggie Shannon started accompanying midwives on residence visits for what would turn into “Extreme Pain, Extreme Joy”, an echo of Walker’s hospital residency. And in 2023, Andi Galdi Vinko’s “Sorry I Gave Birth I Disappeared But Now I’m Back”, a confronting however finally heat account of the primary years of motherhood, received the UK’s Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Photography Book Award.
While hardly a brand new area, in 2025 it appears there is a substantial effort, as a part of a wider marketing campaign of consciousness and correction, to foreground these artists, simply as ladies artists extra broadly have begun to obtain their flowers. The quantity of curiosity in Walker’s work is a primary instance of this. In addition to “Mothering”, her work are presently on show in three group exhibits: the Scottish leg of “Acts of Creation” at Dundee Contemporary Arts, “Good Mom/Bad Mom” at Centraal Museum in Utrecht, and at Dussedorf’s Kunstpalast in “MAMA: From Mary to Merkel”.
In “Mothering: The Family Reborn”, the closing chapter of a Thames & Hudson publication that accompanies Judah’s “Acts of Creation” exhibition, the critic celebrates the notion of mothering as perceived by queer artists, oftentimes in a political context, exploring how “committing to networks of care” and a broader sense of shared accountability has beforehand been, and has the potential to, additional comprise trendy iterations of motherhood. Here, she references artists equivalent to Sadie Lune, Zanele Muholi and Cathy Cade.
In Walker’s case, the time period mothering arrived through a member of the crew at her daughter’s nursery, who defined that it was a key a part of their coaching. Subsequently, Walker stated she started reflecting on “the constellation of women that are part of my children’s care and education, performing vital work and informing a period of a child’s life, which research has shown is important to their development throughout childhood and beyond.”
“I had been exploring the subject of women’s working lives for a few years but becoming a mother really opened my eyes to this whole area of women’s labor in relation to the bearing and rearing of children,” Walker continued. “Women artists have been responding to the demands of motherhood for decades but haven’t always enjoyed the same exposure or validation. If I was making this work 10 years ago, I don’t think it would be getting so much traction.”