Forest Accumulation (Cloth Shrine)

Oil on wood panel
15cm x 10.5cm

Joanna was the Winner of the New Light Valeria Sykes Prize in 2020.

Joanna Whittle is a painter who creates narrative artefacts.  Recent projects include On Shifting Ground, Whitaker Museum, Lancashire, 2022; Material Mourning, Millenium Gallery,  2022 and Between Islands, Welbeck Estate, 2020. Recent group exhibitions include Tyranny of Ambition, Highlanes Public Gallery, Drogheda, Ireland, 2023; Aggregate, Freelands Foundation, London, 2022 and Heavy Water at Site Gallery, Sheffield, 2021. She is a member of the Contemporary British Painting Society and is currently undertaking a period of research with the National Fairground and Circus Archive. Her work has been written about by Griselda Pollock, Lauren Velvick (Corridor 8) and Albert Godetzky (Courtauld Institute) 

The paintings are often constructed from several elements giving them a frozen static quality.  The weather is oppressive, about to storm or kick  up wind whilst red light reflects from clouds. The water or mud isolates structures and trees, making islands and increasing the sense of unease.  Rather than the uncanny however, the paintings pursue those small moments of uncertainty, or hesitancy in our understanding or perception of reality and consequently realism. Elements give way to each other,  grass becomes mud, becomes water which undermines the stillness, there is an undercurrent of flux or motility, of places emerging and submerging. The paintings are on a small or miniature scale  making these worlds more focused and intense. They are not bodily landscapes but rather operate as small hallucinations or worlds running concurrently or beneath reality, formed by minute perceptions.

The ‘Forest Shrine’ paintings emerged during lockdown and depict makeshift constructions limping into view, emerging from walls of trees. Dark vertical pines dropping needles down onto these crouching structures, prickling like rain. These paintings explore themes of memorial, depicting sombre accretions, emerging from the forest floor. Pulling themselves up on their knees. They augment  the rituals of mourning and their residue in the landscape, gradually growing disheveled monuments  through accumulated actions. sites of time puddling where flowers and mementos fade and are replenished.  They are  postcard souvenirs of ritual or painted on to copper to allow the ground to glow through, illuminating darkened scenes, giving them the appearance of icons. Elsewhere other postcards become an archive of shrines, of looming wayside structures  emerging from mist on imagined hillsides, swathed and adorned and watching metal wrought figures, swinging in still winds.