Latest news with #ActsofCreation:OnArtandMotherhood
The Courier
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Courier
Fife artist Caroline Walker's work joins Tracey Emin's in DCA's 'On Art and Motherhood' exhibition
Fife artist Caroline Walker's take on art and motherhood comes to DCA, sitting alongside work by Tracey Emin. DCA's current show arrives as a coup for the Dundee-based arts centre. From London's Hayward Gallery, Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood includes major names such as Margate, Kent's Tracey Emin and Portuguese painter Paula Rego. Another featured artist, though, hails from Courier Country. Born and raised in Dunfermline, Caroline Walker made her name in London. She has since returned to Fife's south coast – taking on a derelict 18th century steading north of Inverkeithing. Having lived down south for 14 years, in 2022 Caroline moved back with her architect husband to seek more space for work and their growing family. 'We had quite a good set up, but my studio and our flat were all very small,' she explains. 'We had one child, wanted to have another one and the opportunity to do a building project up here seemed something that wouldn't be available in London. 'My career was established enough that I didn't have to be there all the time and I suppose we wanted family support for our young children.' Anyone familiar with Caroline's success may already be familiar with her family members. Care and female labour, both paid and unpaid, have become important inspirations. Her children, Daphne, aged two, and five-year-old Laurie often appear, as does the artist's mum Janet. Caroline attended Queen Anne High School, Dunfermline, before Glasgow School of Art and London's Royal College of Art. She fondly remembers how Janet encouraged her creativity. 'From an early age I was crazy about drawing, while I have lots of memories of mum taking me to Kirkcaldy Galleries and the National Galleries [of Scotland, Edinburgh],' she says. 'She got me some oil paints when I was 12 and that was quite exciting.' With those first pigments, Caroline copied images of what she fondly calls 'fancy ladies', the captivating subjects of historical portraits by painters such as Gainsborough, the Scottish Colourists and Glasgow Boys. While her subject matter has developed, the artist has stayed with a medium seen as unfashionable when she arrived at Glasgow in 2000, though later came back in to vogue. 'When I started art school, nobody was painting, apart from maybe a couple who'd be totally abstract,' Caroline says. 'I definitely didn't feel like one of the stars of the year. Though by the time I graduated, painting was having a bit of a moment.' While artists such as the Belgian Luc Tuymans showed paint could still be relevant, Caroline was sticking to her guns, she reveals: 'I like how immediate paint is: you want to put a mark down and there it is. You can quickly describe the world around you.' Later on, while studying for an MA in London, Caroline began to find her calling by thinking back to those 'fancy ladies'. She explains: 'Almost all those historical paintings l'd enjoyed were painted by men. 'That was the start of me more consciously deciding to make work about women's lives and what I could bring to that.' Since then, Caroline has presented several series on women in the workplace – including one on the Little Bugs nursery, Dunfermline, that her daughter attended. Some proceeds from sales of those works paid for an art studio she opened there in November. Her homemaker mother – now a cherished grandparent – became the subject of a 2020 show at Edinburgh's Ingleby Gallery. Her still life of feeding bottles in the DCA comes from a series made about her sister-in-law Lisa, while this spring Caroline has earned a prestigious retrospective exhibition at The Hepworth in Wakefield, West Yorkshire. This includes a documentary about her also to be shown at DCA alongside a Q&A with the artist. Being filmed over three years has been an awkward, though rewarding, experience, Caroline admits. 'Watching the rough cuts felt overwhelming,' she says. 'They captured the most intense period of my life. 'My career has really taken off, but we've been through pregnancy and this big building project. I think there's a connection between motherhood as a subject and the circumstances in which I was making the work.' Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood runs at DCA until July 13, Caroline Walker: Women's Work film and Q&A July 3.
Scotsman
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Art reviews: Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood, Dundee Contemporary Arts ★★★★★ Depth of Field, Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow ★★★★ Metaphors of birth and nurture are common in descriptions of creativity, from the conception of an idea to the labour of bringing it into the world. At the same time, the notion has long been held (more by men than by women, it should be said) that actual conception and birth are enemies to art. Cyril Connolly's 'pram in the hall' remark might sound outdated now, but its effects continue to linger. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad So Acts of Creation, an inspired and ambitious show curated by Hettie Judah for Hayward Touring, feels urgent and important. Fiercely and sensitively, Judah takes issue with the 'blindspot' art has about 'real motherhood', sets out to affirm artists as mothers, and to assert their right to use their own experience in their work. She makes her case with over 100 works, arranged clearly in four colour-coded themes. The 60-plus artists are a broad range: British and international, young and old, famous and little-known. Installation view of Acts of Creation at Dundee Contemporary Arts | Courtesy of DCA The predominant image of motherhood in art is, of course, the Madonna and Child, an idealised, cleaned-up vision, far removed from visceral experience of birth and mothering. Judah sweeps this away in her first section, Creation, with breasts, blood and bodily fluids, from Camille Henrot's 'drippy' watercolours (her word, not mine) to Catherine Elwes' breastfeeding film and Rineke Dijkstra's shockingly vulnerable photographs of women taken just after giving birth. Caroline Walker's painting, Bottles and Pumps, lays bare the paraphernalia of feeding, while Wangechi Mutu's fertility totem and Dorothy Cross's sculpture of a cushion with cow teats summon the animal aspects of the experience. Lea Cetera's hourglass of two mirroring wombs, You Can't Have It All, puts the biology into the biological clock and Lindsay Mendick speaks frankly about Polycistic Ovary Syndrome. Susan Hiller's outstanding work, Ten Months (1977-79), marries daily photographs of her prone belly as it swells like an ever-waxing moon with brief lines of prose, including one of the best descriptions of pregnancy I've ever heard: 'She will bring forth in time. Their 'we' will be extended, her 'I' will be altered, enlarged or annihilated. This is terror hidden in bliss…' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Installation view of Acts of Creation at Dundee Contemporary Arts | Courtesy of Dundee Contemporary Arts The next section, Maintenance, explores the day-to-day work of child-rearing, again ranging widely across artistic media and approaches. Photographer Hannah Starkey depicts the mother as hero, trudging through the snow, her toddler beside her, shopping bags dangling from a broom handle across her shoulders. Mary Kelly's Post-Partum Document combines her son's first attempts at writing with her own deeply honest diary, capturing the maternal obsession with the minutiae of a child's development. Few works communicate the desire to keep a child safe as powerfully as American artist Cassie Anderson's tiny school uniform knitted in kevlar, made in response to a shooting at an elementary school. Marlene Dumas juggles artistic practice and motherhood by giving half-finished paintings to her young daughter and inviting her to collaborate. The section on Loss illuminates different aspects of experience, led by Elina Brotherus' unflinching documentation of five years of fertility treatment, one dashed hope at a time. A young Tracey Emin speaks candidly on film about her abortion ('a mistake, but the best mistake of my life') while Paula Rego's powerful etchings of backstreet abortionists in her native Portugal were made in response to a failed referendum to legalise abortion in 1998. In the final section, The Temple, on deep blue walls, Judah clinches her argument with a series of works, many of them self portraits, in which artists depict themselves as mothers. Some, like Catherine Opie and Leni Dotham, deliberately subvert the imagery of the Madonna; in Dotham's Sleeping Madonna, she looks like she's in a Renaissance painting, then as the painting reveals itself to be a film, drifts off into exhausted sleep, her baby in her arms. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Billie Zangewa's Every Woman stands in a chic business suit amongst a chaos of toys and Lego bricks. Chantal Joffe depicts herself, naked, sitting next to her young daughter in a work which feels raw, honest and vulnerable. Renee Cox is a vision of motherhood as strength and muscle. Everywhere in this show, the personal and the political are finely balanced. Cox's work is political, a fierce response to the demonisation of black mothers. While there is much campaigning work here, and a room (appropriately enough, The Kitchen) devoted to feminist collectives, the power in this show lies in the personal, from Barbara Walker's drawing of her teenage son on enlarged scans of the police dockets he received in Stop and Search incidents, to Anna Grevenitis's surprising double portraits of herself and her daughter Luigia, who has Down's Syndrome. The show does such a good job of debunking the myth of idealised motherhood that you have to look harder to find the positives, but they are there: Joffe's portrait of her daughter as a new baby which seems to have amazement in its simple lines; Paulette Johnson's nude portrait Afterbirth; even the women in Dijkstra's photographs are - while exhausted, befuddled and probably still in pain - also defiant and proud. It's a joy to see a strong themed show which knows what it wants to say and says it, offering up an endlessly broad range of work in support of its arguments. Acts of Creation is moving, interesting, continually surprising. Surely it should clinch the argument. I hope it will. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Portrait of Stephen Campbell by Leslie Black | Leslie Black / Courtesy of Street Level Meanwhile, Depth of Field, a group show at Street Level Photoworks, celebrates the members of Glasgow Photography Group (GPG) who, in the period of 1987-89, were instrumental in laying the groundwork for the gallery's founding. Varied bodies of work, mainly from the 1980s and 1990s, show the range of talent at work in the city at a time when showing photography in Glasgow barely seemed possible. The famous name is David Eustace, who was a mature student in his late twenties when he was in GPG, and went on to live in London, then New York. The portraits here are from his Ego series, mostly shot for glossy magazines in the mid 1990s. Now they're like a slice of history: Eve Arnold, David Frost, George Mackay Brown, a shaven-headed Trainspotting-era Ewan McGregor, a very young floppy-haired Hugh Grant. Portraits from the early 1980s by Kay Ritchie have the same time-warping effect: Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Liz Lochhead, all looking impossibly young. Street photography of Glasgow by Alan Dimmick, Roger Farnham and Stewart Shaw (who died in March, and to whom the exhibition is dedicated) conjures a past that seems simultaneously close and far-distant. Shaw, particularly, captures the times: Aids posters, teachers on strike and the rollercoaster at the Glasgow Garden Festival. His shot of a pedestrian leaping a puddle to dart between two old-style corporation buses is especially memorable. The works of Nigerian-born Oladele Bamgboye, exploring the black body in domestic spaces, feels the most contemporary, prefiguring the work of artists like Matthew Arthur Williams today. Agnes Samuel gives us poetic shots of Orkney, on a visit with the artist Bet Low. Robert Burns shows recent work of Ukraine, the last photograph showing an independence rally in 2012: another piece of history. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Freezing a moment is something photography does so well, and this show is a series of such moments, particularly vivid for those of us who realise we're old enough to remember many of them.
