Dandar Bathers (2015)

In her paintings and prints Caroline Walker creates a quiet and intimate female world. Her practice explores the relationship of women to domestic space, and reflects on a history of representing women in art. Some works include human beings, in others we are drawn to a space without figures, that nonetheless suggests female presence. There is a filmic quality to her paintings in which she often creates the sense of being underwater, both physically and imagined. Walker takes numerous photographs of models in preparation for her paintings, and because of this ‘the eye of the camera’ seems to be inherent in her oil paintings.

Mercer Art Gallery has acquired a suite of works by Caroline Walker that consists of two paintings, Apparition and Dandar Bathers, and her Initiations Portfolio of lithographs. The paintings, one on board, one on paper, present a blurred and distorted world as if seen through water. The woman bather in Apparition turns away from the viewer, resembling a background figure in an Impressionist painting, whereas in Dandar Bathers the faces look back at us, just as they gazed into the artist’s camera. Walker chose Initiations as the title for her portfolio because the production process was new to her. She has described how lithography made her explore the relationship between the intensity and variety of mark making and its outcomes in print, which were entirely different to working with oil paint.

The Mercer Art Gallery is building a significant contemporary collection with an emphasis on women artists, connections with the town’s Spa history and the element of water. The Mercer’s collection includes many notable female artists: Nina Hamnett, Mary Potter, Barbara Rae, Anne Redpath, Rose Garrard, Tacita Dean and Sarah Pickstone, all presented by the Contemporary Art Society.

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