“I am interested in challenging the position of the viewer, particularly in relation to my female subjects. […] I do not want the paintings to feel like pictures of something that is happening somewhere else. I want you to feel like you are involved or implicated in what is going on.”
—Caroline Walker
Depicting a lone woman standing in a hotel room in the middle of the night, Overnighter by Scottish artist Caroline Walker immediately transports the viewer into an interior and somewhat transitoiry space pervaded by an atmophere of quiet solitude. Asked to adopt a somewhat voyeuristic gaze, the spectator is drawn into this silent moment suspended in time, while Walker maintains a palpable sense of narrative tension through the more cinematic qualities of her composition. Positioned just off-centre with her arms crossed over her chest to maintain the warmth of a robe as her blank gaze wanders toward the bed, the female protagonist here leaves enough ambiguity and psychological space for intruders such as us to imagine multiple scenarios and outcomes to the scene.
Equally engaging in its scale, the painting leaves the impression that one could almost step into the scene. On both physical and psychological levels, the spectator is immersed in the latent anxiety activated in Walker's composition, as emphasised by art historian and curator Marco Livingstone who has suggested: ‘however long one gazes into the spaces of [Caroline Walker’s] pictures, one feels wholly convincingly immersed in them, experiencing them from the inside rather than looking longingly from afar’.i