The University of Wolverhampton is delighted to host this in conversation session with artist Caroline Walker. Caroline will be joined by Rina Arya Professor of Visual Culture and Theory at the University of Huddersfield and Alexandra Kokoli Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture at Middlesex University London.

Finding Home

Professor Rina Arya will discuss the notion of home, it is evocative and yet fraught. It has increased valence during Covid; lockdown has alerted us to the safety of the home and the alienated spaces outside of it. For some even finding a home is precarious. Caroline Walker’s paintings of women refugees and asylum seekers depict displaced people in their ‘homes’. These spaces are often makeshift, impermanent and sometimes dangerous, underscoring the plight of these women but also articulating the need of finding a place to make home. Walker paints these women in their homes and brings to the fore the subtleties of their personal identities. Without minimising the political dimensions of her subjects, she draws attention to the simple yet profoundly important human need to be in a safe environment, in a space we can call home, albeit a transitory one.

Alexandra Kokoli situates Walker's painting in feminist art practices that examine and critique domestic space. Walker's perspective on women at work and migrant women at home builds on feminism's challenge to the separation between the personal and the political as well as private and public space, and draws attention to labour that is not quite invisible but regularly goes unnoticed. Knowingly subverting the voyeuristic regimes of European modernism, Walker's gaze is also productively troubled by intersectionality and remains that of an embodied outsider, respectful of the other's unknowability while acknowledging its own out-of-placeness. Walker's art thus evokes a feminist flaneuse and border-crosser whose perspective we are invited to adopt, thus also sharing her responsibility for the labour of intersectional feminism.

Caroline Walker (b 1982, Dunfermline) has a BA in painting from the Glasgow School of Art (2004) and an MA from the Royal College of Art, London (2009). Recent solo exhibitions include KM21, The Hague, Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham, Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, and GRIMM, Amsterdam & New York. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool and Sainsbury Centre, Norwich. Walker is represented in public collections including the National Museum of Wales, UK Government Art Collection, Arts Council Collection, Voorlinden Museum and Kunstmuseum in The Hague. She lives and works in London.

Rina Arya is Professor of Visual Culture and Theory at the University of Huddersfield. She has written extensively about the artist Francis Bacon, Georges Bataille, and abjection. Books include Francis Bacon: Painting in a Godless World (2012), Abjection and Representation: An Exploration of Abjection in the Visual Arts, Film and Literature (2014) and Abject Visions: Powers of horror in art and visual culture (2016). Her main area of interest is the relationship between visual and material culture and religion. She is currently working on an edited book on cultural psychiatry and a monograph on cultural appropriation.

Dr. Alexandra Kokoli is an art historian who researches aesthetic mobilisations of discomfort to political ends, focusing on art practices informed by and committed to intersectional feminism. She works as Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture at Middlesex University London, where she currently leads BA Fine Art, and as Research Associate at VIAD, University of Johannesburg. Her research into the aesthetics of feminist anti-nuclear activism at Greenham Common has been supported by the Paul Mellon Centre and the Leverhulme Trust. She has published widely, including the edited collection Feminism Reframed and the monograph The Feminist Uncanny, and has contributed to the Tate in Focus series on Susan Hiller’s From the Freud Museum. With Maria Walsh, she co-edited a special issue on trauma and repair in museums for the journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, forthcoming in 2022.

Image Credit: Tarh, 11.30am, Southall, 2017.

Courtesy of the artist and GRIMM Amsterdam|New York, Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London.

https://www.carolinewalker.org/