Women’s Work - An exhibition by Caroline Walker

It’s been months since my last blog post, with some major life events, some very happy work projects on the go, some exciting fundraising news and developments on Erbe but more on this later. 

Thinking back to the time when I last made a blog post, we were in the depths of winter and the devasting second wave was ravaging all ours hopes for brighter days ahead. Sitting here on a sunny June day it is almost impossible to remember just how hard those days were. 

Caroline Walker, Three Maids, 2018, Private Collection, London.

One project that kept me going throughout 2020-21 was my continued work as Freelance Curator with MAC (Midlands Arts Centre). Just before Covid hit in March 2020 I was ready to launch Women’s Work, an exhibition by painter Caroline Walker and the most comprehensive by the artist to date. It is accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Professor Griselda Pollock and Professor Tracey Warren and examines the hidden labour of jobs performed by women, such as tailor, housekeepers, cleaners, hairdressers viewed from the sidelines in their otherwise invisible worlds. This often unseen work allows us to go about our daily lives with greater ease and comfort, but also acknowledges the hidden labour, the second shift, or the mental load which is now increasingly being discussed in relation to the work women undertake in their paid and unpaid roles. 

The timing of the pandemic added real significance to this exhibition in a way that we could never anticipate during its planning. Our working lives have been transformed by global events, seeing a dramatic shift in women’s position in the workplace. Suddenly employers were more than happy to trust their staff to WFH, making (in theory) the endless juggle of being a parent/ partner/ carer/ cleaner more do-able. Due to historic inflexibility in the life/ work divide, many women are faced with the impossible choice of spending a significant portion of hard earned salaries on childcare (the UK has the 2ndhighest childcare costs in the world). The alternative is finding suitable part-time employment to fit around caring responsibilities with 61.7% of women choosing to work less hours due to not being able to make it work financially. Then there is the harm working part-time, flexibly or daring to prioritise caring responsibilities has on women’s career progression, with the gender pay gap widening further with each child a woman has. During the pandemic 78% of women admitted that they had struggled to work while providing the lions share of childcare, with a reported 49% feeling pressured to sending their children back to childcare by their employers.[i]

Caroline Walker, Bathroom Sink Cleaning, Mid Morning, March, 2019, Courtesy the Artist

Childcare aside, women massively over represent lower paid sectors (hello widening gender pay gap), such as retail, hospitality and personal services, all sectors that have been overwhelmingly affected by the pandemic. Many women working in these industries have been unable to work from home, seeing disastrous consequences for their economic status inevitable precarity in their home lives and those depending on them. 

Caroline Walker’s paintings capture this labour carried out by women at work who may otherwise be invisible. The hotel housekeepers who barely get recognition for the physical, repetitive, laborious job of cleaning multiple versions of the same room, each in record time, with an attention to detail that it only notices when standards fall short of expectation. Or the highly skilled seamstress relegated to making pockets for an eternity because of the chauvinism that remains in the tailors along Saville Row and across the industry as a whole. 

Caroline began making these painting because she was fascinated by watching women work, passing hairdressers, nail bars and beauty salons, she states: “…sitting on the bus, looking out the window and thinking ‘what’s going on in there?’ thinking these spaces look really interesting because they’re shops filled with women, staffed by women.” Caroline captures a world we’re surrounded by and wholly reliant on, but never see readily depicted in art – particularly fine art painting. That is why it was our strong feeling when curating this exhibition that we also make clear the labour undertaken by the artist, including preparatory works including sketchbooks, old-sketches, notes and an interview with the artist where she makes clear her process. This is something bought up by Griselda Pollock in her essay where she draws comparisons to Manet’s painting of modern life and the work of Caroline Walker. Manet’s subjects we not merely fetishized depictions of women whose jobs rendered them as part of the transaction, but they were portraits of modern life – a life where the independent economic status of women was becoming increasingly relevant.

CForecasting, 2018, Private Collection

Another aspect of the exhibition we’re enormously proud to include are interviews with some of the women featured in Caroline’s painting. Working with the hugely talented radio documentarist  Maria Margaronis these conversations offer great insight to the lived experiences of the women as they talk candidly about their roles and experiences. These are available to listen to via a QR code while visiting the exhibition or on the Women’s Work webpage.

Curating this exhibition and creating this book has been an enormous privilege. It engages with so many topics I care passionately about, acknowledges the work feminism still has to do in gaining fairness and equality and above all celebrates a hugely talented artist whose unique way of showing us what we’re surrounded by and make us question why this isn’t a subject for painting more often. 

Women’s Work is on at MAC until 5th September 2021. If you’re not able to make it please visit MACs website where you can find out more, or buy the catalogue at a bargain exhibition price of £8! 

https://macbirmingham.co.uk/exhibition/womens-work

[i] Stats from the amazing Pregnant Then Screwed website. This is a seriously great resource - https://pregnantthenscrewed.com/research-and-insights/