Overview
Stephen Friedman Gallery is pleased to bring together new paintings by British artists Caroline Walker and Clare Woods for Frieze London
The presentation explores how these two women artists take on the role of observer in their work. Walker is known for her paintings that examine the diverse social, cultural and economic experiences of women living in contemporary society. In this new series, the artist continues to explore the overlooked jobs performed by women, focusing on workers in her daughter Daphne’s nursery in 2022 when the artist still lived in London. Whilst these scenes are rooted in personal experience, the paintings are also universally relatable.
Clare Woods shares Walker’s interest in documenting everyday subjects, with both using their own photography to inform their work. Woods’ recent paintings have been preoccupied with destabilising traditional art historical genres such as portraiture, landscape and – as seen in this body of work – still life.
Woods’ new series depicts grand stone planters overflowing with foliage, drawing on photographs taken by the artist in Regent’s Park, London, twenty years ago. Combining oil and resin to “make the paint move”, the artist adjusts colour and tone through the weight of her brush as a sculptor might manipulate clay. Each work captures a static image, forcing the viewer to stop, observe and look anew at seemingly banal objects.
Stephen Friedman Gallery is pleased to bring together new paintings by British artists Caroline Walker and Clare Woods for Frieze London
In Conversation
Credit: Iceni Studios
Painters Caroline Walker and Clare Woods share a compulsive habit: intently documenting their surroundings, they collect photographic images, a process of scrutiny, aggregation, indexing and filtering that feeds into their respective painting practices, sometimes years after the original images were taken. They each distil scenes and motifs from thousands of shots, reinterpreting them in scores of sketches, a fraction of which eventually results in the actual paintings. In their work they turn a perceptive gaze to contemporary society and interrogate established hierarchies to elevate the often-dismissed still life and genre scenes: on a grand scale, they consider the mundane, the fleeting, the overlooked.
Melanie Vandenbrouck (Chief Curator, Pallant House Gallery, UK)
Caroline Walker
Studio Film
Credit: Iceni Studios
Caroline Walker’s 2024 Frieze London presentation is part of a body of work around nurseries, focusing on the setting her daughter, Daphne, attended until the family moved from London to Scotland two summers ago. The series is set in June 2022, Walker had just completed Lisa, a series following her sister-in-law in the final months of pregnancy and first weeks of motherhood. With Daphne two-and-a-half years old by then, much of Walker’s thinking had been focused on the early stages of bringing up a child and the people involved in their care, predominantly women.
Melanie Vandenbrouck
While Walker’s work has long focused on labour – often unseen, always female – in recent years her investigation has taken a more personal spin, with series centred on her mother (Janet, 2019–20), the maternity unit where she gave birth (Birth Reflections, 2021) followed by Lisa (2022). Much has been said about the first 2,000 days – or five years – of a child’s life, as formative for their development. As Daphne’s nursery routine set in, Walker became fascinated by this transfer from the home to the external childcare context. Planning this new series, Walker captured the different spaces and activities of the nursery, framing her photographs like she would frame paintings, creating narrative sequences to build a picture of the place, the people and what happens there.
Melanie Vandenbrouck
The key protagonists in the series are the working women, their uniform – a cerulean blue T-shirt – the unifying element from one painting to the next. If children are part of the scene, what captivates Walker is the interactions with and interior lives of these women as they play out in the paintings.
Melanie Vandenbrouck
Berthe Morisot, 'The Wet Nurse Angele Feeding Julie Manet' (1880)
Walker’s pictures are emotionally charged, and yet, she eschews the pitfalls of sentimentalism. Instead, there is a certain social commentary that is not unlike Mary Cassatt’s and Berthe Morisot’s sensitive portrayals of ‘wet nurses’, foregrounding the hard labour of the women hired to feed, clean, comfort and educate the offspring of women of higher socioeconomic status. To the question ‘are you a realist’, Walker responds with an emphatic ‘yes’, mentioning Édouard Manet alongside Cassatt and Morisot as influences, a trio of painters who captured the realities of late-nineteenth-century Parisian life in a ‘buttery way of modelling paint’, which she sees as distinctly French. But Walker’s artistic lineage runs deeper, finding roots in seventeenth-century Dutch paintings focused on a single figure framed in three-quarter length, an influence most obvious in Preparing Breakfast. ‘That woman in profile engaged in an activity, that particular sense of light, is something that I have come back to again and again’, she says, ‘the kind of [Johannes] Vermeer inspiration when I am composing something’. A pose she finds herself searching for when she collects, camera in hand, the material for her next paintings.
Melanie Vandenbrouck
Clare Woods
Studio Film
Credit: Iceni Studios
‘It’s complicated’, says Clare Woods as we talk about her latest body of work, still lifes that sit on the cusp of landscape scenes. The conversation moves from weeds to the history of slavery, from gardening to struggle, family to death, pleasure and suffering. As the conversation unravels, these issues are both related and contradictory, implied and explicit, contained in the work and not. Make no mistake, Woods’ still lifes are not innocuous ‘flower arrangements’, as the genre has often been dismissed as; on the contrary, they contain and project the full gamut of human emotions. Intensely personal, they are at once conceptual and physical, figurative and abstract. They may be still lifes but they feel distinctly ‘of the body’.
Melanie Vandenbrouck
Like for Caroline Walker, photographs are Clare Woods’ starting point, even if it often takes years before she uses them to develop new work. In fact, this new series stems from Frieze 20 years ago, when Woods snapped her way through Regent’s Park, London. In The Improver we see luscious emerald stems and crimson flowers erupting out of a stone container. In Woods’ work, title and painting are developed separately, for she collects titles too – some 23,000 and counting – which she pairs with a painting after she completes the work, through an association of words and image that locks in naturally. While the titles are neither descriptive nor intended to explain what the painting is about, they give a sense of how Woods likes to hold together several ideas. She is a keen gardener – a pursuit she describes as a safe place and from which she learns – and in planting ‘an improver is something to make the soil better, but I also like the idea of improving oneself, making oneself better in some way’, she explains.
Melanie Vandenbrouck
Woods turns out to be surprisingly knowledgeable about weeds – a subject that in turn made her think about desirability, or the lack thereof, of displacement, of things considered to be in the wrong place. While looking at plant history may reveal that there are not so many native plants in British gardens, the subject of ‘invasive species’ has become pervasive in gardening discussions in recent years, not unlike the language used by some groups speaking about human migration.
Melanie Vandenbrouck
Eliot Hodgkin, 'St Pauls and St Mary Aldermary from St Swithins Churchyard' (1945). Private Collection. © The Estate of Eliot Hodgkin / Clare Woods, 'The Diggers' (2024) / Albrecht Dürer, 'The Large Piece of Turf' (1503)
Woods’ fascination for history, and the layers of meaning that words acquire also comes in with The Diggers, a term used to refer to people who opposed the Enclosure Act (and called for the abolition of property and aristocracy) in the seventeenth century, but also for the tool used to extract dandelions from the soil. (Like knotweed and bindweed, pulling on dandelion will only result in its root breaking, ensuring regrowth). Inspired by Albrecht Dürer’s Great Piece of Turf (1503, Albertina, Vienna), the viewpoint here is from the ground up, elevating the weeds, the fuzzy dandelion clocks becoming like vaporous clouds. She also cites Eliot Hodgkin’s paintings of weeds pushing through the rubble of London’s bombed sites as inspiration. There’s a resilience and persistence to weeds that feels like life itself – ‘some weed seeds’, Woods marvels, ‘can lay dormant for 400 years.’
Melanie Vandenbrouck
While neither artist’s work could exist without an element of voyeurism, and making us into voyeurs alongside them, Walker’s and Woods’ observations of the everyday are both compassionate and profound. In seeking to bring to the fore the invisible and the ignored, their work not only carries an autobiographical element but touches on the universality of the human condition: of growing and declining bodies, of lives lived and remembered and the ways in which a space – be it in or containing a picture plane – may hold several viewpoints and alternate realities. Despite their scale, their work is intimate and draws you in, revealing that genre scenes and still lifes can carry depth, richness and sometimes darkness that goes well beyond their subject matter.
Melanie Vandenbrouck
Institutional Acquisition Highlights
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Caroline Walker and Clare Woods
Stephen Friedman Gallery is pleased to bring together new paintings by British artists Caroline Walker and Clare Woods for Frieze London. The presentation explores how these two women artists take...
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