Celebrating the life of a work: Caroline Walker reflects on her creative approach and ARR
As we mark the 20th anniversary of the Artist’s Resale Right (ARR) in the UK, we’re connecting with artists to hear about the professional journeys and creative approaches behind works that generate resale royalties.
Caroline Walker shares insights into her painting Conservation, (2010) describing its artistic process, technical challenges, and how it relates to her wider practice. She also reflects on the impact of ARR and her ongoing relationship with her artworks.
Could you reflect on your use of paint, your working process and composition, as well as the subject and narrative within the work?
Setting the scene
Conservation, was from a series of paintings, based on a photo shoot in a new build house in North London, using a hired life model who I’d worked with a few times. At the time, I was beginning to think about how different locations could function like sets. I was becoming very interested in modernist architecture and newer buildings that had some of the similar formal qualities of modernist spaces.
I dressed the model and arranged various props as part of the scene. In the painting, you can see that the space is broken up on one side, which reflects what we physically did in the room. I disrupted the space using a mirrored screen arranged in a concertina form as I wanted to fracture the picture plan. It’s a reflection of something that was physically there rather than a manipulation added during the painting process, as I was becoming interested in how a space changes through the introduction of new objects.
Painting process
The painting itself was one of the biggest paintings I'd made at the time, measuring 2 x 2.9m and it was technically quite challenging for me. I was still working out how to translate the fluidity I felt when working on a smaller scale, into something so big. I was also making large paintings in a very different way to how I work now, from my choice of fabric and the way I'd prepare it, to my methods of building up the painting.
At the time, I was working on cotton duck canvas, sizing it with rabbit skin glue, and priming it with oil primer, which has a very unabsorbent surface so that the paint would slip around on top. Now I use gesso, which is the opposite - the paint really sinks into it. I do a lot of the heavy lifting first, making underpaintings in acrylic and working out the structure in a material that’s easy to correct. Before, I was only painting in oil, which was quite difficult. In a painting like this, there's quite a few areas of thin paint applied in a wash, so if you make a mistake, it can be difficult to correct.
This painting was a huge step forward for me at the time, both in terms of its scale and complex composition, but I was really pleased with the result. It’s the standout painting from that series.
How has your work built on the ongoing interest in women’s lived experiences, especially early in your career and how has that evolved over time?
Narrative, setting, and representations of women
This painting came at a time when I was really starting to think about what I describe as ‘narrative elements’ that feed into a work of art. I'd already been working with the idea of figures in settings, mostly women, for about six or seven years. I continued developing this until about 2017: sourcing locations, casting models, clothing them and directing them with props. I was designing this narrative around the setting, starting to think about either archetypal female figures or stereotypical ways that women might get portrayed, and about how that could be complicated or disrupted in some way.
In this series of paintings, the model was often very incongruous in the wealthy setting, seen strangely or half dressed, doing quite odd activities. Over time, the work developed and I started to think more specifically about what those characters would be doing in that setting. After that series, I began introducing more than one figure, which started to create a relationship between them as well.
The shift in interest
The last project I completed in that style was at a house in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles, where I worked alongside a woman who had been a Miss America contestant in her youth. By then, I was very specific about what characters I was exploring.
Then there was a big shift in my work, and I started to think much more about real women's lives. But my approach still uses the same toolkit that I developed in those earlier years. I’m still considering location, lighting, colour, position of figures, what action they're doing, how they're relating, what are the objects, and what all those things together tell you about what you're looking at.
In what way would you like viewers to connect with your work? Should they be observers, participants, or something else? Do you think men and women might perceive it differently?
Shifting the gaze
I think that has shifted. 15 years ago, the work was much more voyeuristic - I was readdressing or reconsidering what would be the subject of a male artist's gaze, and thinking about what changes when we know there’s a woman artist in that space with that semi-clothed woman. That dynamic between artists and subject is just inherently going to be different.
Entering new spaces
It’s changed partly because there’s a longer process for me to be allowed into the spaces I use now, whether that's a nursery or a hospital. It’s a very different premise, but I think that being a woman entering that space has given me access in a way that wouldn't have been available to me, as a man.
I suppose my work has always been about asking people to question how they look at things and I hope that any viewer who encounters my recent work, finds something that resonates with their own life experiences. The subjects of my paintings are part of our everyday existence, things we all engage with in some way, but don't give much thought to. By making them the focus of my paintings, I hope it encourages a different relationship with them.
After finishing your painting, what is it like to see it leave the studio and enter the art market?
The first big sale
With Conservation, I was keen to get it out into the world and seen. It was first exhibited in New York in 2011, and then later bought by Saatchi, along with two other works later that year.
At the time I wasn’t making very much money from my art, so this was a big deal for me. I had a part time job in the cloakroom at the Royal Academy. When these works sold, I went and bought myself a new coat. I was quite excited. From there on, I experienced other sales and dips, but I see that as the beginning of things starting to feel like they were going in the right direction for me.
It always feels strange when a work leaves the studio. I tend to find that it bothers me less if it goes quickly but the longer something is in the studio, the more attached I get to it. In recent years, there's an added element in that sometimes the paintings feature my own family, which makes it even harder to part with them.
Seeing the work anew
I went to visit the work when it came up for auction at Christie’s, several years later, and it was interesting to come face to face with it again and compare how I was painting back then.
It was one of the first of my paintings to come up at auction and it was quite exciting to see my work suddenly moving into a different level of the art market, with value for people beyond the who initially bought it. The work sold for £31,000, though the estimate was £6-8,000, which meant the Artist’s Resale Right royalty was quite good.
Sometimes I'll see works from 20 years ago coming up for resale that I only got paid a few hundred pounds for. The resale royalty can be more than what I originally sold it for in the first place.
It's helpful to have it ticking along in the background. When I get my royalty statement, it’s a reminder that I still have a stake in my older works.
How do ARR royalties support your practice or your life as an artist?
They're helpful because they provide quite regular income. Exhibitions can be a year and a half apart, and there can be big gaps in earning money from the sale of works in the gallery. It goes into the general pot, because it has this nice regularity, like a salary. But of course, that fluctuates too due to periods when there's lots of work coming up on the secondary market and other times when there might not be anything for a while.
If you were to revisit the same work in 10 to 20 years, how do you think your relationship to it might have changed?
I think I’ve always been interested in the things I explore now, in one form or another since I was a kid. I don't think I'll suddenly get into minimal abstraction. But I can already see some things that are starting to develop that are going to come out over the next two or three years. I like to try to let things happen quite organically.
I believe that there will remain an interest in looking at the world around me and reflecting on it from a female standpoint. I think that’s really been the strongest thread through all my work to date.
About the artist
Caroline Walker is best known for her large-scale canvas works and intimate scenes depicting anonymous women, that blur the boundaries between public and private.
Born in 1982 in Dunfermline in Scotland. She attained her BA at the Glasgow School of Art, before going on to complete her MA at the Royal College of Art in 2009. Walker’s process initially involved hiring models and staging domestic scenes which she photographed and used as the source material for her paintings. More recently, her practice has adopted a more documentarian approach, profiling women at work in nurseries, hospitals, restaurants, nail bars, hair salons and hotels. As a cohesive body of work, Walker’s paintings explore the performance of gender identity, femininity and question how women are depicted across a range of socio-economic contexts.
Caroline Walker has exhibited widely with notable solo shows held at The Hepworth Wakefield; K11 Art Foundation, Shanghai; KM21, The Hague Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh, GRIMM Gallery in Amsterdam and New York, and Kettles Yard, Cambridge and Space K, Seoul. Her works are also held in public collections including the Tate, Institute of Contemporary Art Miami and Longlati Foundation. National Museum Wales and the UK Government Art Collection
