Executed in 2013, the resplendent In Every Dream Home belongs to Caroline Walker’s celebrated series of Palm Springs paintings executed during the mid-2010s. Forming her subjects and spaces with a filmic sense of narrative, Walker’s paintings combine the aesthetics of suburban, upper class Palm Springs with found imagery, memory, imagination, and highly considered photoshoots on location to produce the compositions in this series. Providing a voyeuristic glimpse behind closed doors, what distinguishes the present work is the presence of two figures. Juxtaposing the active figure in the foreground, cleaning the already pristine walkway to the pool, with the passive, seated figure in the background, Walker invokes class contentions between the languid rich and the working class. As an artist who's oeuvre is centrally focused on female identity and women at work, In Every Dream Home speaks to the very heart of Walker's painterly practice.

First developed for Los Angeles’ upper class and Hollywood’s biggest stars of the 1920s, the Californian desert of Palm Springs is famous for its sharp mid-century modern architecture and design. Embodying a distinctly artificial sense of ‘the good life’, the town’s lush gardens, and turquoise pools defy its desolate, desert location. A culture of prosperity set within a landscape of disparity, something about this manufactured would-be paradise suggests the possibility of darker psychological undercurrents. The imagery of a pristine green lawn outlined by a white pavement pathway alludes to the iconography of the American Dream which has captured the imagination of many artists including David Hockney. When asked about her interrogation of this specific pace, Walker recalls: “Obviously the David Hockney refence looms quite large in them, but probably more so, for me, somebody like Eric Fischl. I was thinking a lot about those paintings he made in the 1980s of dystopian suburban American life.” (The artist quoted in: Caroline Walker and Marco Livingstone, Picture Window – Caroline Walker, London, 2018, p. 251)

The title of the work, In Every Dream Home, was inspired by the title of a Bryan Ferry song written for Roxy Music in 1973 – In Every Dream Home A Heartache. The lyrics of the song describe ‘perfect’ homes from ‘Penthouse perfection’ to ‘Open plan living / Bungalow ranch-style’, but they are subsequently followed up by the increasingly cynical: ‘But what goes on / What to do there?’ Walker's inclination towards modernist architecture in the present work is part of her investigation of female identity in relation to location. Often depicted alone, isolated within the confines of a private space, Walker's female subjects are compositionally in dialogue with their surroundings.

Exhibited at the artist's first solo institutional show in 2012 at Pizhanger Manor, In Every Dream Home is a voyeuristic window not only into socioeconomic frictions and the consequential relationship between environment and female identity. Born in 1982 in Dunfermline, Scotland, Walker currently lives and works in London. Walker attended Glasgow School of Art before completing her MA at the Royal College of Art, London, and has had solo exhibitions at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, 2018; the Midlands Art Centre, Birmingham and KM21, The Hague, 2021; as well as Fitzrovia Chapel, London. Having received widespread critical recognition over the past decade, her works are represented in important collects ions around the world including KM21 Kunstmuseum, The Hague, The UK Government Art collects ion, National Museum Wales, and the Pérez Art Museum Miami.