Lois Whitehead: January 2009

The Ex Exchange - 2008

The Ex Exchange - The White Space, GSA Barnes Building, Glasgow - Lois Whitehead, 2008

The Ex Exchange was a projected I organised and created through reflecting on my own circumstances and trying to find ways to relate that sitiuation to other people.
I wanted to continue with the idea of the social as an art event and also with interaction between artist/audience and audience/artwork.
I wanted the event to be accessible to everybody and not just for the entrants, so the final event took place as an exhibition of all the items with their labels so that they were able to be viewed by others.

'The Ex Exchange is an event taking place on the 27th & 28th of Novmber in the White Space at the Barnes Building.
The aim is for you the people to bring along anything left over from your past relationships and to exchange them for other peoples left over things. The idea is to make some positives from what seems like a negative situation. You can cleanse yourself of the old memories and hang ups you have from your ex and to get something new out of it. And to enable that to happen for other people.
The process goes like this..From Thursday the 27th, 10:00 - 19:00, you will be able to come to the Barnes building and drop off whatever item you bring.You will be asked to fill out a small label to be attached to your item telling us a little bit more about it.In return for your item you will receive a voucher and an invitation to join us the day after,friday the 28th, for the actual event.
On Friday the 28th at 18:00 The Ex Exchange begins! All the items will be displayed and there will be food,drink and music.Everyone is encouraged to browse all the items, if you see something that you like you bring it to the desk and hand over your voucher to take your new item away with you!
All items brought will be accepted, nothing you want to bring is the wrong thing to bring. Your relationship could have lasted 1 week or 1 year but we still want you to take part.Examples include : T-shirts, Books, Photoframes, CDs, Toys, Films, Underwear, Posters.. Etc. Anything that belonged to your ex, was a gift or even just reminds you of them.
Please come down on both days and get involved!

-- Text from postcard for 'The Ex Exchage'

Voucher presented to people who took part in the exchange.

Images : Merry Swarbrick
Ideas : Lois Whitehead

Works of None Fiction - 2008

Works of None Fiction - A collaberative exhibition - Queens Arms, Leeds - 2008

“Works of Non-Fiction” is an exhibition by four young female artists from West-Yorkshire. They have worked, studied and grown-up alongside each other and they have shared their lives at an intimate level. Despite these common origins they have produced a particularly diverse range of work exploring numerous themes and many different media.Jenny Hall’s work seeks to describe “peoples’ relationship with cloth” in personal and historical contexts while Lois Whitehead deals with the immediacy of colours and their acquaintance with emotions. Merry Swarbrick’s photographs are the fallout from challenging situations in which she adopts the paradoxical roles of protagonist and victim and Deborah Britton focuses on the results of domestic violence and they way in which intense moments can linger in and shape our memories. Some topics, however, are present throughout the exhibition: questions concerning barriers between personal experience and public expression and the difficulties that the artists have had relating their private emotions and cherished observatRashid, Overview of Statements from 'Works of None Fiction'

ions to others whilst trying to establish their own distinctive voices.

- Josef Pitt-Rashid, 2008, Overview of statements from 'Works of None Fiction'

Postcard For Exhibition

I am a female artist currently entering my fourth year of study in Environmental Art, at the Glasgow School of Art.Throughout my time there i have aquired an invested interest in colour, seeing it as a form and material to express personal thoughts and feelings. Making my work seems to be a struggle between making what is interesting to me, accessible and interesting to others. In the past, this has led me to performance based work, where i have been able to take an active role in the understanding and explanation of the work. I am currently interested in persuing the idea of a 'colour study', to discover more about peoples interest in colour and colour and what specific colours mean to them.

- Lois Whitehead, 2008, Artist Statement from 'Works of None Fiction'

For this exhibition i was concentrating on trying to identify my reasons for being drawn repeatedly to colour and nature. I had been reading 'Chromophobia' by David Bachelor and had become increasingly more interested with the idea of colour as artificial.
So i started to reflect that maybe the reason i am so drawn to colour, particularly within nature is that it seems to exist as the purest form of colour.
I began to think about how colour becomes 'artificial' and thought about putting natural colours through a process where they become 'man made' and the associations we project onto them start to take over.
Inside the Jars are liquids of colour that were extracted from plants, fruit and vegetables by myself and then sorted into their various colours. The labels that were later attached to them are the most popular associations that people connected with that colour (which were taken from a survey i conducted of a large group of people).