Caroline Coon’s Women of Ladbroke Grove, Carnival places women at the centre of one of London’s most significant public rituals, the Notting Hill Carnival. Painted in the early 1990s, the work forms part of Coon’s sustained engagement with Ladbroke Grove, the area in which she has lived and worked for decades, and to which she has repeatedly returned as a locus of counterculture, migration, music, protest, and everyday urban experience.

Rather than treating Carnival as spectacle, Coon foregrounds the women who inhabit the street, granting them structural and visual primacy. Their bodies, gestures, and collective presence organise the composition. They emerge not as incidental figures within a crowd, but as active agents who assert visibility, pleasure, and the occupation of public space.

The painting consolidates several of Coon’s longstanding concerns, including feminism, sexual politics, and resistance to prescriptive notions of gender and respectability. Its saturated palette and defined, graphic figuration lend the scene a directness that is both celebratory and critically engaged. Carnival is articulated here not only as a site of communal expression, but also as a context in which women’s agency is materially and visibly enacted.

Grounded in the social and spatial realities of West London, Women of Ladbroke Grove, Carnival operates simultaneously as a record of place and a reflection on forms of liberation. The street is reconfigured as a space of collective presence, self-possession, and social autonomy.

Caroline Coon has written of this picture: Notting Hill Carnival is where, since I was a teenager, I have gathered with friends to have a good time getting high on music, dancing and drink – our annual bacchanal! Our inebriated loss of inhibition can make us women dangerously vulnerable to unwanted approaches. We have learned to stick together and look out for each other. In this painting, I have women carnival revellers exhausted by dancing, taking breath and resting beside a sound system on Ladbroke Grove. Women friends gather around protectively, keeping the carnival crowd at bay.

I based my composition for this painting on Sir Laurence Alma-Tadema’s Women of Amphissa (1887) - an homage. Amphissa, Greece, was the site of an ancient festival in honour of Bacchus, god of wine. Laurence painted the scene where young bacchantes, exhausted by a night of dancing, are protected by the women of Amphissa who step in to save them from unwanted sexual advances, offering refreshments. Like Alma-Tadema, I like to think that my painting alludes to female strength, women helping women, timelessness hospitality and joy.