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Lot Essay
‘The special relationships formed between nursery worker and child are so important to the series … In these paintings … this moment is frozen in time’ (Caroline Walker)
Rendered on dazzling, immersive scale, Caroline Walker’s Imaginative Play I is an intimate portrait of a hidden world. Included in the artist’s acclaimed exhibition Mothering at the Hepworth Wakefield in 2025, it stands among the finest works in her Nurseries series. These paintings represent some of her most deeply personal creations, depicting children and staff at her daughter Daphne’s nursery in London. Immortalising a setting almost entirely unrepresented in art, they continue Walker’s fascination with the unseen work undertaken by women. With its theatrical lighting, cinematic mise-en-scène and painstaking detail, the present work celebrates the colourful, sensory wonder of early childhood. At the same time, however, it is tinged with bittersweet introspection, capturing the vital yet fleeting bond between caregivers and their young charges. Closely related to Walker’s previous Nurture cycle, Imaginative Play I takes its place alongside works held in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. and the Sifang Art Museum, China.
Walker’s interest in notions of ‘mothering’ coincided with the beginnings of her own family, with one-year-old Daphne featuring in her work as early as 2021. Her subsequent Birth Reflections series depicted staff and mothers on a maternity ward, while her cycle Lisa captured her sister-in-law with her new baby. It was not until the Nurture and Nurseries series, however, that Walker’s practice truly began to intersect with her own autobiography. Nurture began after the artist moved back to Scotland from London, and depicted a number of local preschool settings: an outdoor nursery, a toddler science club and Daphne’s swimming lessons, as well as her newborn son Laurie. Nurseries, however, took a step back in time. For this series, Walker returned to photographs taken two years previously at Daphne’s former nursery in London. Working at distance from her source material in this manner emphasised to her ‘the fleeting nature of this important time in children’s young lives’. The relationship between child and nursery worker, she notes, ‘can be very close’ yet is ultimately ‘short-lived’. In her paintings, she explains, ‘this moment is frozen in time’ (C. Walker, quoted at Stephen Friedman Gallery, online).
Imaginative Play I engages directly with these ideas. The painting is suffused with the enigmatic sense of poignancy that defines Walker’s best works, offsetting the joy of children’s play with the complex emotions borne by its facilitators. The artist relishes the details of her toddler world: the bright colours of toys and decor, the play of light upon waterproof coats, the tactile surfaces of wood, plastic and carpet, and the energetic freedom of children’s artwork. ‘The world of small children is a very visual one and a very textural one’, she explains (C. Walker, quoted in Caroline Walker: Mothering, exh. cat. Hepworth Wakefield, 2025, p. 27). The child herself is lovingly observed, her stance, clothes and facial expression alive with character. On the other side of the room, however, her caregiver seems lost in her own imaginative space as she arranges toys upon the floor. For all its playful whimsy, this is her place of work: the site of her daily toil. She carries the weight of the child’s happiness upon her shoulders, in the knowledge that she will be gone from her care in just a few short years.
Since its inception, Walker’s practice has interrogated the often overlooked roles played by women in society. She depicts them in a variety of personal and professional settings, capturing private moments of reflection as they go about mundane everyday activities. Drawing inspiration from the histories of art and film, she transforms these quotidian scenes into grand, near-religious tableaux, infused with quiet drama and subtle psychological tension. Her engagement with the idea of ‘mothering’ speaks to the complexities at the heart of her practice, interrogating not only the unseen work of parenthood but also the childcare service industry. While artists such as Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot had painted mothers and nursemaids, Walker’s depiction of nurseries speaks to a uniquely contemporary phenomenon. During the series, she was conscious that the women she was depicting were the very reason she was able to continue her own work as an artist. The present painting’s protagonist is arguably a reflection of her own conflicted feelings, her thoughts lost in a universal space where life and labour seamlessly intermingle.
Rendered on dazzling, immersive scale, Caroline Walker’s Imaginative Play I is an intimate portrait of a hidden world. Included in the artist’s acclaimed exhibition Mothering at the Hepworth Wakefield in 2025, it stands among the finest works in her Nurseries series. These paintings represent some of her most deeply personal creations, depicting children and staff at her daughter Daphne’s nursery in London. Immortalising a setting almost entirely unrepresented in art, they continue Walker’s fascination with the unseen work undertaken by women. With its theatrical lighting, cinematic mise-en-scène and painstaking detail, the present work celebrates the colourful, sensory wonder of early childhood. At the same time, however, it is tinged with bittersweet introspection, capturing the vital yet fleeting bond between caregivers and their young charges. Closely related to Walker’s previous Nurture cycle, Imaginative Play I takes its place alongside works held in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. and the Sifang Art Museum, China.
Walker’s interest in notions of ‘mothering’ coincided with the beginnings of her own family, with one-year-old Daphne featuring in her work as early as 2021. Her subsequent Birth Reflections series depicted staff and mothers on a maternity ward, while her cycle Lisa captured her sister-in-law with her new baby. It was not until the Nurture and Nurseries series, however, that Walker’s practice truly began to intersect with her own autobiography. Nurture began after the artist moved back to Scotland from London, and depicted a number of local preschool settings: an outdoor nursery, a toddler science club and Daphne’s swimming lessons, as well as her newborn son Laurie. Nurseries, however, took a step back in time. For this series, Walker returned to photographs taken two years previously at Daphne’s former nursery in London. Working at distance from her source material in this manner emphasised to her ‘the fleeting nature of this important time in children’s young lives’. The relationship between child and nursery worker, she notes, ‘can be very close’ yet is ultimately ‘short-lived’. In her paintings, she explains, ‘this moment is frozen in time’ (C. Walker, quoted at Stephen Friedman Gallery, online).
Imaginative Play I engages directly with these ideas. The painting is suffused with the enigmatic sense of poignancy that defines Walker’s best works, offsetting the joy of children’s play with the complex emotions borne by its facilitators. The artist relishes the details of her toddler world: the bright colours of toys and decor, the play of light upon waterproof coats, the tactile surfaces of wood, plastic and carpet, and the energetic freedom of children’s artwork. ‘The world of small children is a very visual one and a very textural one’, she explains (C. Walker, quoted in Caroline Walker: Mothering, exh. cat. Hepworth Wakefield, 2025, p. 27). The child herself is lovingly observed, her stance, clothes and facial expression alive with character. On the other side of the room, however, her caregiver seems lost in her own imaginative space as she arranges toys upon the floor. For all its playful whimsy, this is her place of work: the site of her daily toil. She carries the weight of the child’s happiness upon her shoulders, in the knowledge that she will be gone from her care in just a few short years.
Since its inception, Walker’s practice has interrogated the often overlooked roles played by women in society. She depicts them in a variety of personal and professional settings, capturing private moments of reflection as they go about mundane everyday activities. Drawing inspiration from the histories of art and film, she transforms these quotidian scenes into grand, near-religious tableaux, infused with quiet drama and subtle psychological tension. Her engagement with the idea of ‘mothering’ speaks to the complexities at the heart of her practice, interrogating not only the unseen work of parenthood but also the childcare service industry. While artists such as Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot had painted mothers and nursemaids, Walker’s depiction of nurseries speaks to a uniquely contemporary phenomenon. During the series, she was conscious that the women she was depicting were the very reason she was able to continue her own work as an artist. The present painting’s protagonist is arguably a reflection of her own conflicted feelings, her thoughts lost in a universal space where life and labour seamlessly intermingle.