Caroline Walker composes her large oil paintings with a painstaking attention to detail that is more often associated with film sets. She scouts locations, selects models, and takes hundreds of photographs which she then carries back to her studio to begin the process of building a narrative for her canvas.

Her paintings are always of women: women at work running vacuums or scrubbing floors; women engaged in strangely charged interactions with other women: tying bikini tops, sunbathing, tricking each other in card games. Their surroundings are often bland yet opulent, ‘masculine,’ as she describes and almost ‘clinical’ in their lack of warmth and charm.

She sees her work as voyeuristic, an examination of her female subjects and their surroundings. As in A Scattering, the interiors are frequently detached and vaguely Modernist in style, made of glass and metal. She probes the concept of wealth and ownership, exploring the psychological realm of these gendered spaces, calling to mind the uneasy gaze of paintings by Eric Fischl or Jeff Wall’s constructed 1999 photograph of a cleaner in Mies van der Rohe’s celebrated glass and steel construction, the Barcelona Pavilion.

Her work harks even further back to the Impressionists’ depictions of modern city life or Walter Sickert’s disquieting Camden Town series, as does her tactile and visible paint handling. Her edges and surfaces are not clean, not entirely devoted to precise realism, but suggest a dissolvement up close when a vase or an orange balanced precisely upon a table is revealed to be nothing more than strokes of skilfully applied paint.

There is a sense of bated breath in A Scattering, as if we wait for the woman to move, to see what she does next, though her image is fixed and forever immobile. We don’t quite know what has happened to make the woman brace herself against the sofa and it is a scene which teeters on a knife’s edge and which could tip into something more sinister at any moment. A bright pink shopping bag rests on the glass coffee table: we are left to wonder if she has just arrived. Has she dropped something, a scattering, and does she look to find it?

Perhaps we question whether she belongs in this house, whether we belong here, or whether she has come to clean or perform other domestic tasks as women so often do in Walker’s paintings. We, too, are implicated, and we watch through the clear glass walls of the house, voyeurs looking in. She looks down, away from us now, but if she were to lift her gaze, she would catch us, catch our uncomfortable eye, and leave us to wonder what might happen next.