Caroline Walker on Mothering in Blue
- Debi Magonet
- Dec 23, 2025
- 6 min read
Updated: Jan 5
Caroline Walker's exhibition "Mothering" at Pallant House Gallery has been called "the mother of all exhibitions" by The Times and named one of the best exhibitions of 2025 by The Art Newspaper. Caroline is an acclaimed painter whose work hangs in major collections worldwide. Born in Dunfermline, Scotland in 1982, she studied at Glasgow School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London. Her large-scale paintings of women in domestic and professional settings have earned her international recognition, an artist who could paint anything for anyone. She's chosen to paint the unseen women of society and now finally, herself.
When I reached out to her during the intensity of her exhibition launch, this new birth of hers, she responded with characteristic maternal generosity. "It continually amazes me the power that art has to help people make sense of things that can be hard to put into words," she wrote. "I found the experience of making the work itself served the same purpose for me."
She kindly sent me the catalogues for her shows. I've been pouring over them, struck immediately by the blues. Caroline paints the hospital, the postnatal ward, that calming palette she describes using to make bearable what she had to retrace. The baby blues. That dismissive term for postnatal distress, could perhaps be rendered here in actual blue - the colour she needed to make something difficult bearable to look at again. Caroline had to retrace her steps through the Middlesex Hospital that failed her on some level. The blues are perhaps how she survived painting that truth.
The paintings were created for the Middlesex Hospital chapel - the last remaining building of the hospital where Caroline gave birth. Now they hang at Pallant House Gallery, but they're forever marked by that origin.
Caroline speaks about avoiding "the high drama" her disappointing birth story isn't depicted. Instead she paints the postnatal ward, the theatre, the ultrasound, the nurses helping mothers change nappies for the first time. She's making visible the collectively unseen work of women and mothers, elevating it to epic scale. But where is she in all of this?
I had to use the list of works at the back to find her. The image is buried there - "Daphne," the painting where, as Caroline says, "I'd opened this door to making my own life a subject for painting." The threshold moment, requiring effort to locate.
This isn't an accident. Caroline has worked extraordinarily hard to elevate everyone else onto the stage - the unseen mothers, the technicians, the nurses - giving them prominence and visibility. Then she tucks herself and Daphne quietly at the back, as if saying: "Look at them first, they've been invisible long enough. I can wait."
It's a maternal gesture in the structure of the exhibition itself - putting others forward before yourself. She's enacting the very pattern of maternal invisibility even while creating work to challenge it. Editor Eleanor Clayton, Head of Collections & Exhibitions at The Hepworth Wakefield, writes about Caroline's "moral sentiment" of bearing witness to the otherwise unacknowledged. Perhaps that instinct to put ourselves last runs deeper than we know.
However Caroline does appear, reflected. In "Me and Laurie, 6 Weeks Old" we catch a glimpse of her in the mirror while health visitor Sarah is at the forefront, weighing baby Laurie. Mother and artist both at work, both visible in the same frame. It's so early in their journey together - just six weeks - and already Caroline is documenting this. The catalogue describes her "profound, exhausted gaze" telling another story while her paint describes "stolen time in the studio."
She paints what she calls "the changing domestic landscape of early motherhood" the claustrophobia of it. The lovely, thoughtful presents that you come to resent. The semi-darkness, late in the day but the lights haven't been turned on yet, unable to move because the baby is sleeping on you. The water glasses accumulating on the coffee table throughout the day. The windows running with condensation because the laundry is drying on the airer and you can barely get around the house because there are mountains of stuff piled up everywhere.
Caroline describes the hospital residency as "incredibly cathartic" having to retrace those steps through the space that failed her. However something unexpected emerged. Her painting "Ultrasound" felt to her like "the least emotionally charged work in the group." Yet several people told her it brought back traumatic memories of miscarriage or problematic pregnancies. "It made me realise," she says, "that I'm making these images but actually it's the people looking at them that really bring the narrative, because they're projecting their own experience."
A mother who had seen the exhibition at The Hepworth wrote to her, the hospital paintings helped her finally talk about a difficult birth experience. This is what Caroline describes as art's power: "to help people make sense of things that can be hard to put into words."
Years later, Caroline paints Daphne's swimming lessons. She speaks about her obsession with painting water, not as a return to maternal waters or symbolic rebirth, but something more immediate: "the sheer pleasure of moving paint around to describe something constantly moving." The sensory pleasure of movement, of working with fluidity rather than trying to pin it down. The pleasure of the ungraspable made visible through technique.
Caroline elevates her own mother Janet in these paintings too, raising the status of domestic labor to epic scale.
As Silvia Federici writes: "Capital has been very successful in hiding our work. It has created a true masterpiece at the expense of women. By denying housework a wage and transforming it into an act of love, capital has killed many birds with one stone." Caroline paints against this theft. She paints women's work as worthy of gallery walls, of serious attention.
She paints in what Kristeva describes as the cyclical time of motherhood "the slow, difficult and delightful apprenticeship in attentiveness, gentleness, forgetting oneself." Kristeva's appeal is that women pursue the ability to succeed in this path "without masochism and without annihilating one's affective, intellectual and professional personality."
What strikes me most about Caroline's work is that she holds multiple gazes at once. The artist's eye and the mother's exhaustion. The public witness of institutional failure and the intimate tenderness of early weeks. The external gaze on society's invisible women and the internal gaze on her own experience. She makes public what is usually held privately and what dissolves unmarked back into the everyday. As curator Pollock notes, "calls for our deep attention."
These are images that create permission and space to finally look at what got lost in the blur of survival. Time to think about it. Time to see it.
Caroline Walker: Mothering runs at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester until 26 April 2025.
Caroline's website is https://carolinewalker.org/
About the author: Debi is an HCPC-registered integrative art psychotherapist in private practice in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire and online nationally. She specialises in perinatal mental health and matrescence/patrescence, working with creative modalities including sand tray, clay, movement and arts-based techniques to help clients explore experiences that exist beyond words.
Comments