Joanna Whittle
Joanna Whittle’s paintings explore transient rituals concealed within the landscape, through small-scale paintings which draw the viewer into an uneasy, unpeopled world. The temporary structures depicted sink into flooded land, acting as fragile ruins of the recent past with lights illuminated and the unsettling sense of a recently departed presence. Her shrine works explore themes of memorial; evidencing unseen and repeated rituals conducted in acts of mourning. The absent subjects of these memorial acts seem to encompass the landscape as both the mourner and the mourned. They are often painted onto copper with the ground glowing beneath, illuminating darkened scenes so they appear as icons or meticulously laid on to ephemeral paper postcards which become heavy with paint
“The physical smallness of Joanna Whittle’s paintings, where-ever they arrive from and resonate with, make the viewer come physically close […] Only then, when near and attentive, do we see how intensely painterly they are, how much the effect and the affect arises from the sure confidence of the artist’s touch, the delight of the experienced brush that has animated a tiny inflection on a tree or placed two dots of paint upon each to create a single pink light piercing the damp gloom of the lonely night. Her work is, as the artist said to me a ‘celebration of painting’ in its technical mastery, its knowing relation to its peers and antecedents and ultimately its deeply affective and hence philosophical meditations on being in the world, when human relations to the environment are more acutely significant than ever. This evolution of a landscape painting practice so affectively attuned to the hurt of human alienation and to mourning strikes a deep chord in this moment.” Griselda Pollock, 2020
Biography
Joanna Whittle studied at St Martins and the Royal College of Art. She was winner of the CBP Prize in 2019 and in 2020 was awarded the New Light, Valeria Sykes Award. She was selected for the John Moores Painting Prize exhibition in 2018 and 2023. She regularly works with public collections resulting in solo exhibitions at the National Fairground & Circus Archive, Welbeck Estate and Whitaker Museum between 2020-2023. In 2024 she presented her solo exhibition ‘Lost Territories’ with Charlie Smith London. She has shown nationally and internationally in numerous group exhibitions including, between 2020-24, Saatchi Gallery, Highlanes Gallery, Ireland, Huddersfield Art Gallery, Freelands Foundation, and Site Gallery, Sheffield. In 2021 she became a founding member of Heavy Water Collective working with archives and collections, including the Sedgwick Museum, Cambridge University and showing at Graves Gallery, Sheffield. Her work is held in public and private collections.
