Over the past ten years Caroline Walker (b.1982) has become well known for her paintings of women, specifically, women at work in all manner of circumstances from the domestic scenarios of her own lived experience to more detached encounters in shops, cafés, offices and hotels. There’s a lineage here that connects to the domestic interiors of the Dutch Golden Age as well as to the everyday realism of Degas and Manet, the intimism of Vuillard and Cassatt, and the awkward voyeurism of Hopper. Whatever the context, Walker’s work offers the viewer a momentary glimpse into the lives of women, quietly revealing the complexities of their place in contemporary society as fleeting fragments of often invisible female labour take centre stage. Hers…