GRIMM is happy to announce The Vacation Park, a solo exhibition of latest work and drawings by British artist Caroline Walker. The exhibition is on view on the New York gallery from March 28 to Could 3, 2025.
The Vacation Park is a brand new physique of labor by Caroline Walker that takes the exercise led, family-friendly vacation park as its setting. A setting that’s synthetic but acquainted, posed for the aim of elevating the leisure of company and minimising their notion of labour. This atmosphere, reproduced within the painted particulars highlights its confection, from the bogus glow of the amusement arcade to the uniformly uniformed workers, the wave patterned swimming pool tiles and the managed panorama. Adopting a extra autobiographical method to image-making that has change into synonymous with the artist’s follow in recent times, the sequence seems to focus on the connection between work and leisure, drawing out the sociopolitical situations that assemble every mode.
After a household break at one such resort in 2023, Walker recognised the potential on this microcosm. This extremely constructed atmosphere contained actions that had been the themes of latest our bodies of labor: housekeeping, catering and the nurture and care of younger youngsters, whereas additionally alluding to the staged scenes that characterised earlier sequence. In collaboration with Parkdean Resorts, Walker and her household spent per week in July 2024 at two of their places within the South of England. Throughout this time she photographed ladies working in numerous roles throughout the positioning. Set towards the branded backdrop of the resort, the ensuing work doc each her household’s expertise as holidaymakers and function a report of the easily choreographed work of the ladies who made their vacation attainable.
Tracing the artist’s enduring preoccupation with the not often seen websites of girls’s affective labour, every feminine topic seems to the viewer unaware that they’re being noticed. Whether or not depicted accumulating youngsters’s inflatable pool toys, performing as a part of the night leisure or cleansing vacation cabins earlier than the arrival of latest company, Walker’s topics are engaged wholly with the job in hand. Rendered in vivid color, the ladies’s arms are at all times busy. Their eyes by no means meet our gaze and in-so-doing they resist interpretation and the imposition of a singular narrative.
