7 Artworks to see in Artists for Kettle's Yard

Caroline Walker is a celebrated contemporary painter, known for making visible the lives of women in different occupations and walks of life. Walker featured in the 2018 Kettle’s Yard exhibition Actions. The Image of the world can be different (part 1). Her subjects are closely and quietly observed in rich colour, and through expert brushwork and attention to the fall of light and shadow. Her paintings beautifully capture the labour, attentiveness and care that underpins so much of how women live, exploring the multifaceted position of women in contemporary societies. Walker’s style of painting feels very contemporary, despite incorporating historical inspirations such as the domesticity of the Dutch Golden Age, the realism of 19th century French painters Edgar Degas and Édouard Manet, and the quiet domestic scenes of Édouard Vuillard.

Snack Table is part of my current series about nurseries, portraying the daily routine of their female workforce and the children in their care. It depicts a still life of the snack table at the start of the day, with its bags of fruit ready to be laid out, genteel little jugs of milk and vase of flowers, mimicking the pretend tea parties which form part of the children’s play.

Caroline Walker

This work will be available to purchase in Sotheby’s Contemporary Day Auction on 25 June 2026.

Sunil Gupta is a pioneering photographer renowned for images that are both frank and sensitive in their social and political commentary. His work explores themes of race, migration and queerness, giving space to individual and collective identities. Sunil Gupta: Life with a Camera, 1970 – Now, a major new exhibition surveying Gupta’s work, will open at Kettle’s Yard in September 2026.

This photograph has been selected for Artists for Kettle’s Yard and is exhibited (and available to buy) for the first time. The image is an ‘outtake’ from the seminal series ‘Exiles’ (1986-1987), in which Sunil Gupta photographed gay men at well-known cruising sites and more private locations across Delhi, at a time when homosexuality was illegal in India. The finished prints are often presented alongside quotations as if spoken by their subjects, making gay Indian men visible and giving them a voice at a time when they were largely invisible within society.

This work will be available to purchase from Kettle’s Yard.

These new ceramic works by Jennifer Lee were thrown using Mashiko and Shigaraki clays, which were dug for the artist in Japan, a country whose longstanding ceramics traditions profoundly impact her work. Since the 1970s, Lee has built pots by hand, but at a residency in Shigaraki in the 2010s, Lee was drawn back to the throwing wheel. In 2019, we welcomed Jennifer Lee for a solo exhibition the potter’s space, where she displayed her remarkable pots in the gallery and the Kettle’s Yard House.

Lee has developed a method of colouring pots by mixing metallic oxides into clay before making, which stains the clay and leaves coloured layers, similar to the layers of the earth from which they came. A sense of geology, time and place is present in Lee’s work: from the slow process of making pots, the use of centuries-old traditions and the long history of the earth inherent in the clay itself. See the four new ceramics on display in the exhibition.

These works will be available to buy at Kettle’s Yard.