Caroline Walker’s large-scale paintings and ink drawings, currently on show at The Hepworth Wakefield in the exhibition Mothering, depict everyday moments, focusing on scenes in living rooms, bedrooms, hospitals and childcare settings. The subjects of Walker’s paintings are women: mothers, nurses, midwives, grandmothers, early years practitioners, playscheme workers, all engaged in quotidian acts of care: hairdrying, feeding, playing, swimming. The size of the paintings, the colours and the form, give the viewer the sense of catching glimpses of people’s lives. Private moments. The mother breastfeeding a newborn on an armchair in the corner of a room, we assume at a time when no one else is awake. The view through a wide window of a baby in a babygro standing in a living room, leaning onto something, perhaps playing with a plastic toy, in light which suggests early morning or evening. The grandmother drying a little girl’s hair, or sticking stickers at the dining room table, with paints and other arts materials strewn around, laundry drying on the creel overhead. For the home and hospital settings, we feel voyeuristic somehow, peering into these private moments, yet also very much at home. For these are the very moments of the everyday and the mundane, moments which mostly go on unobserved, undocumented.
But this work is not the reification of the singular mother or the ‘birthing parent’. Mother here is a verb not a noun, and mothering, viewed through Walker’s expansive canvas lenses, goes beyond the mother-baby, mother-child dyad, encompassing grandparents, healthcare workers and playworkers. And stuff. The stuff, the things, the clutter of the everyday. Walker has spent time as artist-in-residence in maternity and postnatal wards, while also drawing on more personal inspiration including her own child, her mother and her sister-in-law. Her paintings, uncurated in their focus, show us the materiality of mothering, the empty and half-drunk, abandoned glasses of water, forgotten cups of tea: the clutter of the everyday work of mothering. Mothering is the work of all these actors in Walker’s scenes, in the maternity wards, forest schools and play centres. All are tasked with mothering, and all are entangled in the complex socio-economic and socio-cultural web of roles which are under-valued and therefore invisibilised.
The response to the exhibition of Walker’s work at The Hepworth Wakefield has been incredible, including a 5* Guardian newspaper review, which describes it as ‘the stunning parenting paintings every mother should see’. Why is it so surprising to see paintings of scenes of this kind, scenes which play out everyday in homes, nurseries and hospitals across the country? Why should paintings of this size and scope which deal with the everyday of mothering be so unexpected? Perhaps it speaks to unshakeable ideas of what should be visible and what should remain behind doors, unseen. And of course, that which is valued and undervalued. What should art explore, what scenes are worthy of painting? These ideas were also explored recently in a touring exhibition curated by Hettie Judah, accompanied by a book exploring artists and motherhood, ‘Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood’.
These ideas are very relevant to research I’ve been undertaking over the past few years with creative journaling groups, set up to support mothers and birthing parents through arts-based activities. The settings I have been exploring, mostly under the umbrella of ‘Maternal Journal’, an international movement which aims to support anyone who identifies as a mother through art and creativity, allow spaces for people to focus on creative practice and reflect on the everyday. They make the everyday visible and important - but they also make the everyday worthy of creative exploration.
Through my research in West Yorkshire with The Art House, I’ve been looking at how arts-based support for mothers and birthing parents is being adopted and explored collaboratively by healthcare workers, community support programmes, midwives, family support hubs, artists and creative practitioners. One of many things linking the works in the Mothering exhibition with the Maternal Journal movement, and creative health more generally, is the focus on creative exploration of the everyday of mothering. This brings the unseen, the indoors, the everyday preparation of meals, school runs, cleaning, bathing, laundry, stories and stickers, into focus. To mother, beyond the notion of a mother. The Maternal Journal workshops offer a dedicated space for people to meet together, usually with childcare provided in an adjoining or nearby room, and create something that links to their experiences, working with published materials created by creative practitioners, including visual artists, poets and writers.
My research has shown the power and potential of these kinds of spaces for those participating, and how focusing on these everyday moments of mothering, both through individual creative practice and through sharing with others can help to both value and support mothering in all its forms. Additionally, my research into this practice, like the Mothering artworks, foregrounds the practitioner labour and care that goes into supporting all those who mother. In 2025, as part of IGEN-funded creative health programme at The Art House, a Maternal Journal practitioner network was established, providing a space for those preparing and delivering activities to share their experiences and provide professional development. The practitioners, as with those engaged in the acts of care and nurture depicted by Walker, are also mothering. Arts and Health Manager Diane Saxon and I presented practitioner case studies at the recent GLAMCARES practitioner conference in Leeds in June, highlighting the work and emotional care that is involved in this work, at intersections of the arts, health and wellbeing. As Walker (2025) states, this is all about care, nurture and human relationships.
Back in May I attended the public opening of both Mothering and the Helen Chadwick retrospective Life Pleasures which opened beside it with a couple of friends including one who, like me, is the mother of a teenager. I’ve since been back a number of times, with friends, with my partner, and with my mother, and also alone. Each time, the experience has been different. At the opening a friend told me she found the paintings made her feel quite emotional, remembering that often lonely, sleepless time of new motherhood. She found the paintings hard to look at. I was drawn to the clutter of some of the paintings, the un-curated, un-aesthetic elements, the unfinished glasses of water, the bottles drying by the sink, the materiality, the mess. The nursing mother painting transported me abruptly and without warning to my bedroom, 15 years ago, as I sat uncomfortably on my bed during the early hours of the morning so as to stay awake while my eldest daughter fed, seemingly insatiably. My mother paused by the paintings of Walker’s mother and daughter, reminded of her own time spent with my daughters - her grandchildren - when they were younger. I remembered my grandparents’ kitchen, the aga, the creel.
What Walker’s paintings and the creative journaling of the everyday in Maternal Journal groups have in common is bringing the quotidian, mundane acts of care and nurture that mothering entails into view. The size and scale of Walker’s paintings tell us that mothering is important, that mothering is worthy of creative attention, and that the labour of all those involved is indeed the labour of love and care. Artistic creation and sharing of everyday experiences within Maternal Journal groups also foregrounds what is so often invisible, taken for granted.
Dr Jessica Bradley is Senior Lecturer in Literacies and Language in the School of Education at the University of Sheffield. She is a member of the iHuman executive group. Her research explores everyday creativity in arts and health contexts, including working collaboratively with the arts and health programme at the Art House Wakefield and with Maternal Journal.
jessica.bradley@sheffield.ac.uk
Caroline Walker: Mothering is at The Hepworth Wakefield until 26 October 2025.
