Jo Whittle
Whittle's work falls in to the category of landscape with the paintings depicting scenes of apparent abandonment, but with an attention to detail that belies this dereliction. She emphasises the materiality of paint and its illusory deployment to describe the fabric of the place being uncovered. Paint glossed with high art mediums can be gloss coated metal flecked with dry paint rust.
The places sought are often a convergence of landscape, environment and history and whilst the paintings are always specific to their site and its topography they can contain imagined or incongruous elements from the past or present, denoting the notion of landscape as memory within the present. Similarly paint is deployed with the same idealised notion of its integrity to create this illusion. Some paintings pass over to the imaginary more than others. The drawings form a large part of the work and provide the space where places float and drift in and out of context or are scratched out in ink drawings. There are also collections of smaller works, drawings, scratchings and models in works such as 'Natural History' and 'Dovia'. Whittle studied at Central St Martins and the Royal College of Art and has shown in London, New York, and East Anglia. She has most recently shown at Collyer Bristow Gallery in London as part of ‘Strangelands’. |