Viewing Caroline Walker: Birth Reflections

Flooding Instagram feeds this week is the new Caroline Walker pop-up exhibition at the Fitzrovia Chapel in London. Supported by Stephen Friedman Gallery, it includes new paintings depicting midwives, doctors, cleaners and mothers at the maternity wing of University College Hospital (UCLH), where Walker recently completed an artist residency.

Although Walker has long painted aspects of unseen and overlooked female labour, it wasn’t until she found out that she was pregnant and began attending appointments at the hospital that she developed a particular interest in the mother and baby unit as a potential subject matter.

‘Trips to the maternity wing for scans, blood tests, antenatal classes and then the birth itself were both a new experience emotionally for me, but also visually,’ she explains. ‘I decided that the maternity wing would make the ideal subject for my work, bringing together my personal relationship to this hospital with an ongoing interest in depicting women’s working lives through painting.’

Walker was also inspired by Frederick Cayley Robinson’s ‘The Acts of Mercy’, a series of four allegorical paintings exploring the positive forces of the human spirit in the face of destruction. The works, which originally hung in the foyer of the Middlesex hospital, now form part of the nearby Wellcome Collection.

Complementing the exhibition is a display of ink drawings and oil sketches at UCLH from Caroline’s time at the hospital. Make sure to explore the public programme of events too.