Review published in The Skinny

Whole days whiled away pottering around the house, bits of cleaning here and there and tending to the plants with a level of care and tenderness usually afforded to babies. A routine easy to identify with as our worlds have been shrunk to the confines of our homes and minutiae have become daily events. This is the world of Janet. 

At the Ingleby Gallery, Caroline Walker’s exhibition, Janet, focuses on her mother. They are simple oil paintings, not stylistically groundbreaking, and yet their subject is captivating. The exhibition of just fifteen paintings works well as a series in which we glimpse snapshots of a never ending domestic labour. Janet, a silver-haired, trainer-clad, jumper-touting woman potters around from canvas to canvas vacuuming, watering the garden, dusting, washing up, and performing a very relatable form of womanhood. 

In Making Fishcakes, Late Afternoon, December we look from the dark outside in at Janet under a golden light at work by the sink, a cluster of fish slices in front of her - her pot of tools. In Tucking In, Late Evening, March we see Janet in the conservatory pottering around and preparing her plants for the cold night ahead. In Planting Decisions, Early Afternoon, May her gloved hands show her deep in thought whilst looking down at trays of seedlings.

They are lovely compositions, with a quality of light akin to Dutch genre paintings. The success of Walker’s work is in her ability to find this tender beauty in what could all too easily be a two-dimensional portrayal of years of oppression under patriarchy. Whilst there is no doubt that Janet is a woman produced by these circumstances, the paintings also probe Janet’s psychological interior, asking us to see her as an active female subject, not merely a passive submitter to gender stereotypes. Janet is a caretaker, caught in the act of taking care. She moves from room to room through the house, a nest from which the chicks have long since fledged and which she nevertheless maintains, perhaps out of love, or pride, or habit, or in the hope they’ll come back.

Janet is on at The Ingleby Gallery until 19th December.