Exhibition
Caroline Walker - Marlborough Fine Art
24th-31st August 2010
Private View, 24th August 6-8pm
Marlborough is pleased to present the work of Caroline Walker, the winner of the
Valerie Beston Artist’ Trust Prize 2009.
The charity was established in 2006 to support artists at the beginning of their
careers. Miss Beston, as former director of the gallery, provided help to many
artists during the course of her work. The charity is collaborating with the
Royal College of Art to award an annual prize to a postgraduate student on
graduating. This comprises a studio for a year at SPACE, a financial
contribution towards materials, tutorial support generously provided by the RCA,
and an exhibition at the end of the year. Catherine Lampert and Pilar Ordovas
have kindly selected the winner of the prize.
Located between reality and fiction, Caroline Walker’s work plays with
temporalities and constructed narrative developed through collaboration with
life models at different locations or ‘sets’, exploring the relationship of
women to the domestic.
The repetition of structures and furniture contain the figure, playing with a
veiling of the body through architectural space and light and undermining its
traditional hierarchy. Objects operate as both points of art historical
reference and banal domestic paraphernalia, setting up uneasy relationships with
the position of a gaze, while a sense of artifice or disguise seen in the
actions and dress of the figure reinforces the fictive painting space in which
narrative is implied but not made explicit.
The work rests within the historical context of the female subject in painting,
but is reconsidered through a female gaze. The use of a life model rather than
an actress gives room to explore the female figure more as a projection space
for investigating ideas of a feminine subject, rather than the notion of an
actress acting out a role. While the subject in the resulting works is
definitely involved in some performative task, this is not prescribed, but
rather fabricated or staged through the painting process. The solitary nature of
the female figure addresses anxieties about isolation and the relationship
developed between artist and model re-examines a traditional artist/model
exchange.
Caroline Walker was born in Dunfermline in 1982 and now lives and works in
London. She studied at Glasgow School of Art 2000-2004 and the Royal College of
Art 2007-2009 and is also the recipient of the 2009 Neville Burston Award, Royal
College of Art, 2009 Tom Bendhem Drawing Prize, Royal College of Art and a Dewar
Arts Award in 2007. Her work has been previously selected for the John Moores
(2006), Jerwood Contemporary Painters (2008), and has also recently been
shortlisted for the 2010 Threadneedle Prize. She has exhibited widely across the
UK and abroad, and has a forthcoming solo show at Ivan Gallery in Bucharest.
