Artist Biography 2023
Whittle is a member of the Contemporary British Painting Society and was a selector for the Contemporary British Painting Prize in 2021. She has undertaken numerous solo projects and has shown extensively in group exhibitions including, in 2023 Beyond the Gaze, Saatchi gallery; Entwined, Plants in Contemporary Painting, touring exhibition, Huddersfield Art Gallery and Scunthorpe arts Centre; Arcadia for All? at the Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, Leeds University and Attenborough Arts Centre, Leicester; X, Contemporary British Painting at Newcastle Contemporary Art and in 2022 Aggregate, Freelands Foundation and Heavy Water, Site Gallery, Sheffield, 2021. She is a founding member of the Heavy Water Collective currently PostNatures at Graves Gallery in 2023/24.
In 2018 & 2023 she was shortlisted for the John Moores Painting Prize, exhibiting at the Walker Art Gallery. In 2019 she was winner of the Contemporary British Painting Prize and in 2020 she was awarded the New Light Valeria Sykes Award. Her most recent solo exhibitions include On Shifting Ground, at the Whitaker Museum (Lancashire, 2022) and Ghosted Ground (2023)at the Western Bank Library, University of Sheffield, following a period of research with the National Fairground and Circus Archive, Sheffield.
Statement
Joanna Whittle is painter and artefact maker who explores transient rituals concealed within the structures we leave in the landscape and the objects which emerge from them. Her paintings unravel traditional landscape tropes, creating rich and seductive small-scale paintings which draw the viewer into an uneasy, unpeopled world. The temporary structures depicted sink into motile, flooded land, acting as fragile ruins of the recent past or even of the present with lights illuminated and the unsettling sense of a recently departed presence. Makeshift shrines are depicted in dark forests, evidencing the human trace in accumulated acts of mourning whilst her ceramics emerge as artefacts from elusive histories, taking the form of objects borne from unknown rituals. Throughout her work Whittle explores themes of ungroundedness and loss, of shifting perspectives and hidden activities and their fragile residue in the landscape. In both practices she presents the intangible as credible and explores different methods of display to authenticate this uncertainty.
Independent Research Includes:
- Between Islands, Welbeck Estate, Worksop, Nottinghamshire, 2020 – exploring narratives created within collections through curation and the development of artefacts through collection and site exploration. Working with the Portland Collection’s miniatures and artefacts and exploring the history of the Welbeck Estate and its placement in Sherwood Forest. Creating new narratives from The English Atlas, Volume 1, For James II as Duke of York Hand-drawn and coloured double-page maps heightened with gold. Owned by William 1st Earl of Portland. Printed for Moses Pitt at the Angel in St. Pauls-Church-Yard, London, MDCLXXX. [1680] (held in the Portland Collection) and The Blazing World, a 1666 work of prose fiction by the English writer Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle and prior inhabitant of Welbeck Abbey. 1Funded by a DYCP grant from Arts Council England and culminating in an exhibition at the Harley Gallery in 2020.
- Material Mouring, 2022 –research project funded by Festival of the Mind, researching mourning and burial rituals in material culture with archaeologist Dr Lizzy Carig-Atkins (University of Sheffield), exploring the Rothwell Bone Charnel; Sheffield General Cemetery Non-Conformist Chapel Crypt and archaeological sites in Castleton and at the Hurkling Stones (Derbyshire) and collaboration with Dr Jane Wildgoose founder and keeper of the Jane Wildgoose Memorial Library.
- National Fairground and Circus Archive, 2022- 2023- A yearlong research period with the NFCA funded by an Arts Council England Project Grant exploring showman culture and identity, transience in the landscape, fairground architecture and also explores the functioning and relevance of archives to contemporary culture and communities. The project involved multiple collaborations with fairground Showmen, circus performers, photographers, academics and community groups. The final exhibition includes original paintings, drawings and ceramics by Joanna alongside oral histories, collections from the National Fairground and Circus Archive, loans from the Sheffield and District African Caribbean Community Association (SADACCA) photographs by Bob Chase and Julie Pinnington Wright and work from the Society of Explorers (Site Gallery, Sheffield) and The Big House (London).
Research with the Heavy water Collective:
- Cardiff Special collections (2022)– Texts relating to the Protestant Reformation in conversation with First World war correspondence magazines with landscape being the third protagonist in this narrative. Also romantic and picturesque landscape tropes in relation to landscape destruction. Final works produced exhibited in PostNatures at Graves Gallery (Sheffield) curated by Heavy water member Victoria Lucas.
- Sheffield General Cemetery (2022): Victorian mourning rituals associated with landscape. Exploring ideas of above and below ground activities and the politics of death, burial, mourning and memorial.
Leeds Special Collections (2023 ongoing): Research into ANZAC solders in deserts and Holy Lands. Landscape designs and architecture in the 1800s and ideas of wilderness, wildness and the English hermit in the 1700s.