Artist Caroline Walls Paints Windows into Moments of Intimacy Between Women

The limited palette and graphic shapes of this artist’s paintings are windows into moments of intimacy between women.

At first glance, Caroline Walls’ oil paintings offer a restrained take on colour, form and figure. She uses just three hues – blue black, golden ochre and titanium white – and crops her compositions tightly. Striped folds of fabric are a recurring motif, giving a graphic boldness that, on second glance, begins to soften and bloom with sensuality. “I use the draped fabrics as symbolic stand-ins for the body,” she says. “The fluidity of the fabric speaks to the fluidity of female connection.”

After finishing university in 2006, Walls moved overseas, working in fashion art direction and design. Yearning to return to the visual art practice she’d loved in high school and to Australia, her decision to pursue an artistic career was swiftly rewarded when Gallerysmith in Prahran, Melbourne, exhibited the paintings from her year at Victorian College of the Arts. “There were 30 or 40 works and they hung them all,” she says. “That really lit the flame.”

A large Instagram following has helped the artist find buyers in Sweden, Budapest and Mexico, as well as New York, Los Angeles, London and Paris. “About half of my works end up overseas.” To Walls’ relief, enthusiasm for her art didn’t change when her style did. “I had become known for minimalist, abstract works but now I’m returning to more overtly figurative painting.”

With a solo show titled She Once Was at Melbourne’s James Makin Gallery opening later this month, playing music in the studio helps to get Walls in the zone. “Lately it’s been Sharon Van Etten, Adrianne Lenker and Mazzy Star,” she says. “This next body of work is really going to home in on the figure. My references have more narrative and context, too... elements of architecture such as steps, some graphic shadow or the texture of a tree. I feel like I’m only at the beginning of the next stage.”

Studied: Bachelor of Visual Communication & Design, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne; Graduate Certificate of Visual Arts, Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne

Exhibited at: Michael Reid Gallery, Sydney; James Makin Gallery, Melbourne; Rhodes Contemporary, London

What the critics say: “Caroline Walls’ inspirations traverse the female form, intimacy, sexuality and personal identity – and the universal motherly tension of trying to be all things to all people.” Amber Creswell Bell, author and art curator

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